


washing away the mirror’s sins

by stitchingatthecircuitboard



Series: the mercy cut [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: F/F, F/M, Gen, Leia Naberrie, Luke Naberrie
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-19
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:55:24
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 56,901
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24808123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stitchingatthecircuitboard/pseuds/stitchingatthecircuitboard
Summary: Asajj wakes to a galaxy tilted on its axis.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker | Darth Vader & Luke Skywalker, Barriss Offee/Ahsoka Tano, Leia Organa & Luke Skywalker, Padmé Amidala/Sabé
Series: the mercy cut [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/540271
Comments: 83
Kudos: 133





	1. one: asajj

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to [rain-sleet-snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow) for handholding!
> 
> HERE WE ARE, FOLX, ONTO THE FINAL INSTALLMENT!

“Good,” Windu says briskly, when Asajj ducks out of her tent and into the bracing wind of the Mandalorian steppes, “you’re up. Strategy meeting in three minutes, Ventress. Don’t be late.”

“When am I ever,” she retorts, but grabs a protein bar and shoves into the mess long enough to steal someone’s caff before sprinting to the strategy tent. She makes it with seconds to spare, shouldering her way through to stand at Windu’s back, tearing off chunks of the protein bar with her teeth. It’s rude, or something like it, but kriff all if it’s not what she has time for today. 

Windu looks around the tent, the beings gathered there in person and those present only by hologram. At the other end of the table, the Wellspring watches, rigid on her throne, face smoothed over by cosmetics. 

“What news?” Windu asks, directing the question at their spymaster. 

“We think Vader is gone,” Dormé says. If possible, Wellspring grows only stiffer. “We’ve not seen his TIE fighter in two rotations, nor has he been spotted planetside. A shuttle was seen departing the _Devastator_ seven hours ago; it jumped to hyperspace the second it cleared Mandalore’s gravity well. Near as we can tell, it wasn’t from his quarters, but our best guess is that he’s either incapacitated or he’s gone.”

Windu considers this, and Asajj, too, tries to extend her senses, but where Windu is likely searching for Skywalker’s signature, Asajj hunts for that golden flare of light she’s seen so rarely. 

But there is nothing. 

“Was it a deep space-capable shuttle?” Windu asks.

Dormé nods. 

“Then let us assume, for the moment, that he is gone,” Windu says. “This will embolden us, but we must not throw away our caution. This could be a ruse.” But he sounds doubtful even as he says it. 

Asajj looks down the long table and into the Wellspring’s eyes, made blue in the light of the hologram. For an instant, they wear the same expression: fury at an opportunity missed. And then Wellspring’s face smooths over once again, and Asajj guards her own expression, too. 

“Palpatine will have summoned him,” Wellspring says, “for something he deems more important than Mandalore. We must discover what immediately. I’ll put Draven and his agents on it.”

“In the meantime,” Windu says, “with Vader gone, we are that much closer to taking the planet. We need to focus now on solidifying our alliances with the Clans. Only then can we turn our attention to the capital, Sundari.” 

Wellspring asks, “Where is the lady Kryze?”

“Overseeing the liberation of the camps at Ronion,” Dormé says, “otherwise she would be here.”

“We can expect perhaps another thousand warriors from Ronion,” Windu says, “once Bo-Katan returns. But thousands more will need medical attention, shelter, provisions. We need Naboo to provide those things, Padmé.”

Wellspring inclines her head to the side, listening intently as someone beyond the hologram’s scope speaks to her. After a moment, she says, “Though the Naboo have suffered camps of their own, we will be glad to send what resources we can to aid our Mandalorian allies.”

It’s a warning, that statement: they may not receive as much as they need.

“In the meantime,” Windu says, “if all goes according to plan, Bo-Katan should be back in two rotations. If not, Ventress will join her with reinforcements. Clan Wren is leading a conference of the Clans upon their return. Once they have agreed to the treaties we have helped them draft, we can move on Sundari. Until then, rest and training for the troops. Unit commanders, see to it.”

The commanders disperse from the tent, but Wellspring stays. Dormé, Windu, and Asajj stay, too. 

“He’ll have taken Luke with him,” Wellspring says at last, and suddenly she is no longer a figurehead or a queen, but human, a mother, bereaved.

“Yes,” Windu says, “I imagine so.”

She closes her eyes. Asajj holds her breath. Finally, Wellspring says, measured and slow, “I am trying very hard not to be angry with you. I am not—entirely succeeding. Remind me why we waited to attempt a rescue.”

“We couldn’t,” Dormé says. “We have no one on the _Devastator_ sympathetic to us. No one who could help us.”

“Except Luke,” Wellspring says. “Couldn’t he have helped you?”

“Not in the ways we needed help,” Windu says, gently implacable. “We needed schematics, precision, to be sure we could extract him unharmed. He could signal where he was, but not how to reach him.”

“And I can’t be sure we even made contact,” Asajj says. “He was so quick to shut me out last time I found him.” She had tried, long painful hours of meditation with Windu at her side, countless times, and failed except to know he was still there. 

Wellspring massages her temples. “What good,” she bites out, “is the kriffing Force if it cannot bring my son back to me?”

Silence hangs in the air between them, stark as a bolt of lightning, as the promise of imminent thunder. 

“It is not ours to question the ways of the Force,” says Windu slowly. 

“It should be someone’s,” Wellspring snaps. The vehemence of her words seems to drain her of her fury. She sags back into the throne. “I’m sorry,” she says quietly. “I know we had good reasons. I know you did your best. I am grateful to you all for trying. But it...galls me to have come so close to rescuing him only to be thwarted at the last minute.”

“It galls here, too,” Asajj says, as close to a confession of camaraderie as she is willing to make. She shifts, and changes the topic. “How’s Jyn getting along?”

“Just fine, last I heard,” Wellspring says. “Ahsoka sends me regular reports. She’s teaching my daughter how to forge documents.” Her look narrows at that, unable to quite approve. 

“Useful skill to have,” Asajj says with a shrug. She plays it casually as she can when she next asks: “And the girl? And Ahsoka?”

Wellspring scrutinizes her for a long moment. “Fine,” she says slowly, “as last I heard.”

It’s not enough information. Not by a long shot. Asajj wants all the gory details: Ahsoka’s daily schedule, whether she likes the food she eats or is hungering for a real hunt, if she’s as bored babysitting as Asajj suspects she might be, how the sweat might pearl between her montrals during training when the girl is particularly good. If she’s lonely, in space, Offee a galaxy away and no real equal on board. If she ever thinks of Asajj, cold on the Mandalorian steppes, her face lit violet by the light of her sabers, her teeth bared for battle. 

And she wonders about the girl, too. A firestarter, that one, and precious for it. How has she grown in the Force? What color does she shine in the dark?

But it is clear, after Asajj lets the silence drag for a beat, then two, that “fine” is the most she is going to get out of Wellspring. A meager morsel for the hunger gnawing at her heart, but Asajj has subsisted on less.

Camp isn’t far from Ronion, a fact for which Asajj finds herself grateful when Windu rouses her in the middle of the next night. “Kryze is requesting backup,” he says, “the Empire’s deployed a platoon to Ronion. Dormé thinks they know Kryze is there.”

“Told you we shouldn’t’ve let her go,” Asajj yawns, but she shakes herself awake and grabs her go-bag. She’s ready to leave in two minutes. Windu hands her s steaming cup of caff once she exits her tent. 

“Soldiers are making their way to the transports,” Windu tells her, as though Asajj couldn’t surmise as much from the commotion in the camp. “Dormé’s prepared a datapad for you with briefings on the situation at Ronion. Remember, you can retreat to the city if you need to; we’re in the process of negotiating shelter as we speak, but we have good relations with the Clans there, and should have a settlement ready by the time you touch down, if not sooner.”

“Good,” Asajj says, “keep us out of this kriffing cold.”

“Bo-Katan Kryze and her forces are caught between the camp army and the one the Empire just dropped on her,” Windu says, as though she had not spoken. “We must assume assassination is their goal. Protect Kryze at all costs; she is the linchpin of our alliances here.”

“And the prisoners?”

Windu shrugs. “If necessary, evacuate Kryze and go back for them.”

Privately, Asajj thinks she’ll do no such thing. Windu still thinks like a Jedi assigned to protect someone. He’s not thinking about the political implications. If Kryze is evacuated, she’ll lose all credibility in the eyes of Mandalorians, and with that goes their precious alliance, too. She’ll kill Kryze herself before she evacuates her. Better to have a martyr than a scapegoat. 

“Ventress,” Windu says warningly. She stops and meets his gaze. “Protect Kryze at all costs. I mean it.”

Asajj tosses off a half-hearted salute and finishes her caff. “Yes, sir,” she drawls. 

“I mean it!” he shouts after her, and Asajj shakes her head as she heads to the transports, Dormé’s datapad tucked under her arm. She knows he does. But it won’t stop her from doing what needs to be done, if it needs to be done. 

It’s just over three hundred kilometers to Ronion. Transports make it in a little under an hour. She reads Dormé’s briefings at speed—the size of the Imperial forces, the weapons and tactics they’re likely to face, how long they can expect to be entrenched—and then sets the datapad aside. 

“We’re going to divide our forces,” she tells her unit commanders. She points to the map. “I want two units inside the camp. Mandalorian flyers. Drop a weapons cache and sound the alarm. Dormé thinks there are at least a thousand fighters in there. Let’s get them fighting. The rest of you—we’re going to flank the Imps and pincer them until we get to Kryze and her forces. Same for the flyers—drop the cache, arm the fighters, kill the guard army.”

“Not exactly stealthy,” notes one of her commanders.

Asajj shrugs. “Stealth didn’t help Kryze on the first go around,” she says. “And it’s not something the Imps understand. You want to get through those buckets on their heads, you have to come in hard. Violence is all they understand.”

She knows this because violence is all she understands anymore, too.

Moments before they have eyes on the Imperial army, Asajj turns to her troops, bares her teeth in something approximating a smile. “Let’s break some buckets, soldiers,” she cries, and the transport swoops down low over the steppes, and, an army of her own at her back, Asajj ignites her orchid sabers and leaps. 

Her knees ache as she lands in a crouch on the dusty plain, no longer quite so spry as she had been even when she was Dooku’s apprentice. Heedless of the pain—she’s borne enough of it in her life to make this one insignificant—Asajj springs forward, the Force amplifying her bloodlust, her army quick and steadfast at her back, into the Imperial forces.

Force, how she loves a good melee fight. The sheer brutality of it sings to her, through her, animating her like nothing else ever does. The first Imp she reaches she beheads with one great swing, her second saber rising instinctively to preempt another’s attack, stabbing him through the chest. Dislodging her blade is the work of seconds, which she spends dismembering anyone within the reach of her first saber. By the time the bucket heads rouse enough to realize they have an enemy in their ranks, she’s slaughtered twelve of them. Blaster fire rings out around her like a symphony. Asajj laughs, high and grating, and redoubles her efforts. 

She, and her unit behind her, are the first to reach Kryze’s forces. “Bo-Katan!” she shouts into the fight, and her soldiers take up the cry: _Bo-Katan! Bo-Katan! Bo-Katan!_ The very air seems to vibrate with the force of their call. 

At last, that severe bob of red hair emerges, that voiding blade slicing through the air, that strong, stocky figure swooping down from the Mandalorians fighting from on high. She raises the Darksaber in a salute. “Mandalorians!” she shouts. “For the Alliance!”

Around her, in the air and on the ground, soldiers take up the cry. _Alliance!_ they call, _Alliance!_ And Asajj wields her sabers with every fragment of skill she’s ever earned, calls on the Force with every gram of courage she’s ever mustered, and takes to the slaughter with laughter ringing off her sharp teeth. 

It is a massacre. Of course it is; Asajj has never left a battlefield as anything else, save in defeat. She reeks of death by the time it is over: the sweat down her back and under her arms, the dirt smeared in a long dark streak on her side when she fought too close to a bomb; the bloody char of death by lightsaber crusting on her nails, her wrists, her face. It smells like victory. She’s only rarely felt this alive. 

And Bo-Katan is still alive. Asajj bites the inside of her cheek to curb the impulse to smile. She may yet live, this Kryze sister. 

A soldier—not one of the aging clones who still, ever more sparsely, populates Alliance armies—claps her on the back in solidarity and she shrugs him off, just barely controlling the instinct to throw him bodily from her with the Force. She nods, instead, tight and restrained, and calls for her second to begin securing prisoners, for units to begin escorting the liberated Mandalorians from the camps to the great crystal dome of Ronion proper. Bo-Katan is giving similar orders by the sound of it to her own soldiers, and Asajj thinks that they’ll need to have a talk, the two of them, about command and politics and perception, before any Clan from Ronion observes their parallel operation. 

But she doesn’t get to have that talk with Bo-Katan, after all: what remains of the day passes too quickly to carve out the necessary moment, between pitching camp and housing the liberated Mandalorians and getting the supplies they have distributed to those who need them most. It’s in the early hours of the morning that Asajj finally falls to her sleeping roll, and she’s lost to this or any other world in seconds. 

Weeks pass in a blur of resettling refugees in Ronion and elsewhere; long lines of medical inspections and ration queues. Battle done, Asajj hates war. It is intolerably boring. 

She puts up with it anyway. Windu’d have her head if she didn’t. 

Asajj wakes to a galaxy tilted on its axis. 

Her center of gravity feels irrevocably altered; the tent seems to spin around her. She almost vomits twice while she flails out, looking for her comm. When she finally gets it, it takes Mace Windu only seconds to answer.

“Do you feel it,” she grits out, greeting forsaken. 

He looks at her curiously. “Something is...different,” he says. “What do you feel?”

Her head feels as though it’s about to cleave in two, her stomach is roiling its displeasure, and Asajj can’t bear to even think of walking. She tells him as much. 

Windu frowns. “Get yourself to the medics,” he advises, “you may have caught something.”

Asajj shakes her head and immediately regrets it. When she’s sure she’s not going to vomit, she says, “It’s in the Force. Something’s changed. Something big. You really don’t feel it?”

He is slower in his response this time, considering her question. “I feel...as though the earth has shifted beneath my feet. As though magnetic poles have been reversed. But it’s subtle. Not there unless I look for it.”

“Hells,” Asajj rasps, “hope Palpatine doesn’t think to look for it.”

Windu looks at her with concern. “We’ll have Dormé and her agents look into it,” he decides. “In the meantime—get a medic or medidroid to look you over. Just in case. We can’t lose you, Ventress.”

The holo disconnects. Asajj lays her head very carefully back down. It’s a nice sentiment, she reflects, as she requests a medic to her tent, but like all sentiment, it’s ultimately useless. Conviction is growing like bacteria in her gut. 

It’s time for her to leave Mandalore.

Predictably, the medidroid finds nothing physically wrong with her. Asajj comms Windu, a vindictive little _I told you so_ , swallows down her nausea, and drags herself to her feet despite her dizziness. The battle over, Force willing, it should just be meetings and councils today. And those, she can tune out if needed. She won’t be around long enough for her laxity to have any consequences, anyway. 

Her mind is made up. No sense denying it, or the Force-instinct buzzing through her bones, pulling like a hook through her navel. She’ll tie up what loose ends she has here, and be gone by the next morning, following that instinct across the stars. 

To that end, Asajj unceremoniously promotes her second, Dharra, giving them what little notice she can that their responsibilities are about to become even more complicated than they already were. Dharra, always more poised than Asajjj, takes it with good grace, but watches after her speculatively, as though they could tease out the meaning behind their promotion by looking hard enough. It reminds Asajj of Jyn, that wariness, that watchfulness, and she finds, not for the first time, that she misses the girl and her quick, acerbic competence, her raw brutality in a fight. 

By midday, she’s contributed what little she can to the one council she’s attended. Politics are not—have never been—her strong suit, and all the necessary talk of supply chains and medical reports and weapons inventory bores her to death even when she’s planning to stick around for the bloodshed. No, there’s only one thing to do before she leaves Ronion for good, and that’s talk with Bo-Katan Kryze.

“You’re leaving,” Kryze says bluntly when Asajj finds her in her tent. 

Asajj shrugs. “Mission accomplished,” she says drily. “I’m only of use to you on a battlefield. Battle’s over.”

“You sell yourself too short by half,” Kryze says, curt. “But you only do so to get me to let you leave, so. Leave.”

 _Let_ rankles at Asajj’s pride, at the nape of her neck. She shrugs it off. Years ago that would’ve drawn her into a fight, but years with Windu, and with the Tatooine runners, have taught her patience in at least some things. She sits down on the camper’s stool in Kryze’s tent instead. Kryze looks up from her datapad and raises one red brow.

Asajj says, as blunt as Kryze had been earlier, “I would’ve killed you yesterday, if you had shown weakness.”

Kryze goes still. Her eyes flit to the hilt of the Darksaber, behind her on the top of her bedroll. She’s closer to it than Asajj, but Asajj has two of her own sabers at her belt, and the Force as her ally.

“Fear not,” Asajj says, cold comfort. “I’m not here to kill you.”

Slowly, Kryze asks, “Would it have been on Windu’s orders?”

“He explicitly forbade it,” Asajj says.

“Then why?”

Asajj takes her time in answering. “You must be careful,” she says, “that your value as a figurehead is not eclipsed by your value as a martyr. That is the calculation that people like me make. It is the calculus that will allow you to live, if you control it.”

Kryze drums her fingers along the tabletop. “I see,” she says finally. “Thank you for the warning.”

Asajj rises, and bows. “For Mandalore,” she says, only a little sardonic.

But Kryze is entirely sincere when she replies. “For Mandalore.”

The hard part comes later. It always does. Asajj, in one of her last acts as general, commandeers a shuttle and flies the hour back to the Mandalorian base camp of the Alliance. The ship set to autopilot, Asajj pours over star charts and cosmographs, searching for that Force-flare of instinct among the thousand suns and systems. It jumps and flickers: Ilum to Endor to Yavin to Bespin and back, jumping around the galaxy in an haphazard pattern. She snarls at the charts, baring her teeth as though she could cow them into submission, but of course it is useless. Even she must bow to the will of the Force.

At base camp, she makes her excuses to Windu’s second in command and takes another shuttle through atmosphere, making her way to the Rebellion cruisers supplied by the Mon Calamari, clustered on the far side of the planet from the Empire’s forces.

Windu awaits her when she finally arrives, expression etched with impatient disapproval. 

“What are you doing back?” he asks.

“‘Congratulations, Ventress, on a battle well won,’” she says, mimicking his deep voice as best she can. “‘Well done on achieving your mission. Don’t know what we’d do without you.’”

He massages his brow. “You left Dharra to oversee things with Kryze?”

“But of course,” Asajj says, sketching a bow. 

“Then let’s talk,” he says, and turns and strides back toward the briefing rooms off the bridge. 

In the briefing room, soundproofed and shut, Windu says sharply, “I meant it when I said we can’t lose you, Asajj.”

It’s the first time he’s ever said her given name. The shock of it sparks up her spine, making her sit straighter. She takes a moment and gathers herself. “This is the will of the Force, Master Windu. You know it as well as I.”

His jaw twitches. “Sometimes,” he mutters, “I think Padmé has the right of it. Someone should question that will.”

“But that is not our place,” Asajj says. “Not yet.”

“Where will you go?”

“I’m not sure yet. The Force will guide me.”

He hesitates. “Do you know why you’re going?”

She’s slow again in answering. “I think it has to do with the children, or one of them.”

“I’ve been meditating on it,” Windu says. “That disturbance we felt. I think it came from both of them. The echoes of it ring out from two ends of the galaxy.”

“Has Dormé been able to uncover anything?”

Windu shakes his head. “Some unease among the higher ranks of the Empire, but we don’t have an agent stationed that well. Something happened, but it’s so classified that no one knows what it is.”

“That’ll be the boy, then,” Asajj says. “Don’t you think?”

“With Dormé and Draven on it, Wellspring should have word of him soon,” Windu says. “That should help her.”

“I shudder to think,” Asajj says, watching him closely, “what the girl might’ve gotten herself into to cause such a disturbance.”

“Padmé might have more information,” he says slowly. “You should comm her before you leave. You may not have to go anywhere.”

“Fine,” she says, “but I’m going to hail my ride, too.”

He stands, then, and claps her on the shoulder. “If you go, you’ll be missed, Ventress.”

“I know.”

She doesn’t have the Wellspring’s comm, but Obi-Wan Kenobi reliably takes her calls, so it’s him she comms first. 

He answers, the blur of his surroundings indicating motion. “What is it, Ventress?”

“Have you felt it?”

A pause. He stops moving, frowns at her. “Yes,” he says slowly, “I have.”

“It’s the children,” she tells him. “The Skywalkers.”

A longer pause. “I know that,” he says. “How do you?”

“The Force willed it,” she says. “Has there been any word? Of the girl?”

Kenobi scrutinizes her. “I’ll call you back shortly,” he says. “Stand by.”

Then he’s gone. To see the Wellspring, presumably. Asajj settles in to wait, but Kenobi is calling her back within minutes, Wellspring and her partner arrayed beside him in all their Nubian finery.

“Why are you asking about Leia?” Wellspring demands. “And none of this ‘will of the Force,’ I want an actual answer.”

“Kenobi has told you of the disturbance, then?”

“Yes,” Wellspring says shortly. “What of it?”

“My lady,” Asajj says, as carefully as she can—and after so many years with Dooku, that is very careful indeed—“I think it very possible that this disturbance will have alerted Palpatine to your children’s presence.”

Wellspring blanches, as much as one can blanch in hologram. She turns a seeking hand to Kenobi, her other caught tightly in her partner’s hands. “Obi-Wan—”

“If Lady Ventress has sensed it, after meeting the twins so briefly so long ago, we must consider the possibility,” he says heavily.

Wellspring turns back to Asajj. It’s hard to tell with the way the hologram ripples, but Asajj thinks she might be shaking. No wonder: she’s lost her children to protect them, and now it’s all for naught. “For what do you seek my permission, Lady?”

Asajj licks her lips. She says, “I want to leave Mandalore and go in search of them.”

Silence, punctured only by the holo’s static, rings in the emptiness after her words. 

“Explain,” says the Wellspring. 

“My lady,” Asajj says, “it is an instinct borne of the Force. I sense your children. The girl especially. They call to me from across the stars.”

“You know where Luke is?” asks Wellspring’s partner, sharply. 

“No,” Asajj says quickly, “that is: I could follow him, track him, but it would be a venture of years. I could not use lightspeed; I would need a dedicated crew. And I sense the girl needs me more.”

“Leia is safe with one I trust above all,” Wellspring says. “Allow me to assure you: she does not need you.”

But Kenobi is quiet, meditative. “She’s telling the truth, Padmé.”

Wellspring looks at him in alarm. “Is Leia in danger?”

“No more than she ever is,” he says. “But I, too, sense she is in need.”

“But what of our son?” Wellspring’s partner asks. “It has been years already. Surely he takes priority.”

But Wellspring is torn. Asajj can see it in her eyes, the desire to recover her son warring with the need to protect her daughter. 

“Come to Naboo,” Wellspring says, sudden and decisive. “Lady Ventress—come to us on Naboo. We will take counsel on the best way forward.”


	2. two: luke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Luke looks at his father, wants to see through to the heart of him, but Anakin’s face is closed again. “What will happen to you,” he whispers, “when we get to Naboo?”
> 
> “I don’t know,” Anakin says. “But don’t worry about me, Luke. I’ll be fine. Your mother is just. Don’t worry about me.” But his words ring hollow in the still cabin air.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> don't get used to this update pace, ladies and gentlefolk! 
> 
> with many thanks to may for the cheerleading :)
> 
> nb: Mom is Padmé, Mama is Sabé

Luke wakes to his father bent over him, staring at Luke’s closed fist. He starts—not at Anakin’s presence; that is too common to warrant real surprise—but at his fist itself. He opens his hand. 

A shard of green crystal lays upon his palm. Anakin scrutinizes it. 

“That’s kyber,” he says, and Luke swallows. He knows it is. He knows exactly where this crystal is from. Once again, he sees in his mind’s eye that great hulking mass of emerald crystal in its metal carapace at the heart of the Death Star, shattered into a million fragments upon its reunion with the Living Force at Luke’s hand. 

Anakin stares at it a moment longer, and then looks to Luke, something like pride, something like fear on his face. “Well, I guess we know what we’re doing while we’re in hyperspace.”

“Yes,” Luke says. He supposes they do. 

Luke has less than no idea where they were, where the Death Star was stationed. Somewhere remote, it must have been, somewhere without prying eyes—but that could be anywhere from Byss to Wild Space. The journey to Naboo could be hours or a week. Only Anakin knows. Luke hasn’t asked, isn’t going to. He’s reluctant to confront Anakin with the reality of his choice before it’s absolutely necessary. Difficult to predict under the best and worst of circumstances, Anakin is now inscrutable, impossible to read, as though all emotion has been carefully peeled away like so much dead skin, leaving something new and unmarked in its place. 

Their shuttle set to autopilot, Anakin ransacks the compartments and Luke’s pack—Anakin had brought nothing but his red lightsaber—for materials out of which to build Luke’s saber. He hums, pleased, at the toolkit and repair kit he finds stowed neatly in the cockpit, and seizes the first but, like all seasoned pilots, leaves the second exactly where it is after a brief survey of its contents. The metal lock-blocks and wiring Luke had smuggled from the workbench receive a similar reaction. The Force toy, though, causes him to still, head canted in consideration. 

He brings it with him to the growing pile of resources on the floor. 

“When I made my sabers,” Anakin says, “each time, I had dedicated resources. Mentors guiding me, supplies tailored to the task at hand.” He does not meet Luke’s eyes. “I...regret that you don’t have that.”

It’s the closest Anakin has ever come to an apology for anything, let alone his actions during the Purges. Luke bites down the rejection he knows she—can he dare to think her name, now? Surely Anakin will meet her on Naboo—would hurl: that Anakin is the reason Luke has no mentors, no specialized tools. But Luke knows two things: the Emperor is the real enemy, the real cause; and:

“You can be my mentor,” Luke offers, and something in Anakin loosens at that, even as determination rises in him. 

“I’ll do my best,” Anakin swears, as devout as he’s ever been. 

Luke knows, instinctively, the form his lightsaber will take. The straight line of the hilt, the ridges enclosing the powerful crystal. He lacks the vocabulary to express this to Anakin, though. 

“Look,” Anakin says, seizing on the problem immediately. He raises the unlit hilt of his red saber to the level of their eyes, and disperses its constitutive elements, pointing to each one and naming them in their turn. Stabilizing ring, blade emitter and its matrix, activator, modulation circuits, energy gate: he identifies and defines them, stressing the importance of each. 

There’s no fixative binding the saber that Luke can see. “How does it stay together?”

“Through the Force,” Anakin says, his face betraying the dissatisfaction he must feel with the answer, as a prodigious mechanic himself. “It can only be dissembled through the Force, too—unless it’s cut by another saber, or crushed in a droid manufacturing plant, or—” He clears his throat. “A lightsaber can be destroyed, except for the crystal, if someone really wants to destroy it. Or if you’re careless with it. But it can only be dissembled through the Force, and only when wielded by its maker. I don’t know more about how it works than that. You’ll—you’ll have to ask Obi-Wan, when you see him.”

Luke looks at his father, wants to see through to the heart of him, but Anakin’s face is closed again. “What will happen to you,” he whispers, “when we get to Naboo?”

“I don’t know,” Anakin says. “But don’t worry about me, Luke. I’ll be fine. Your mother is just. Don’t worry about me.” But his words ring hollow in the still cabin air, and he quickly redirects them both to constructing Luke’s lightsaber. 

It’s slow going. They lack the proper tools, the proper materials. Everything they need, they must shape themselves with the blowtorch and soldering iron and spanners from the ship’s toolkit. If Anakin were even half the mechanic he is, they could not manage it. Luke finds himself grateful for every year practicing repairs under Artoo’s watchful scope, for the three years of nothing but his own ingenuity bounding him at Anakin’s workbench. He needs every minute of experience to keep up with his father, for Anakin does nothing for him, just demonstrates a technique and watches Luke fumble to copy it, correcting and offering praise as earned. “You must know your lightsaber inside and out,” Anakin says. “This weapon is your life.” Old, echoing words. “You must be prepared to dismantle or repair it at a moment’s notice.”

Sweat beads at Luke’s temples, threatening to blind him. He raises the iron in one hand and the Force in the other, and fuses two curved pieces of metal into a full cylinder about the length and width of his thumb. This joins the pile of finished components between Luke and Anakin.

“Good,” Anakin says, “just like that.” He surveys the pile of components: the improvised energy gate, the blade emitter pirated from Anakin’s red saber (too difficult to make on their own, but Anakin has promised to show him how once they’re better equipped), the power cell modified from an emergency stockpile by the toolkit and repair kit, the stabilizing ring, activators, and energy gates soldered together and fused with the Force. “That’s everything. Now for the hard part.”

“Is it really?” Luke dreads something more difficult than what he’s just done.

Anakin shrugs. “I don’t know. Assemblage was usually the only part I had to worry about. But I never found it that difficult. You’re easily as strong in the Force as I am—maybe stronger. I doubt it’ll be hard for you.”

 _Helpful_ , thinks Luke with the flutterings of panic. It’s irrational, this panic; he knows this. After his trial with the Emperor—the lightning caught brilliant in his hands, the Death Star disabled—anything with the Force should be easy. By comparison, everything should be easy. But here is the secret Luke is afraid to tell: He has no idea how he managed. Lightning and courage and clarity of vision are all a mystery to him. He could not replicate it even if he wanted to. In the moment, it was as natural as breathing, blinking, his heart beating without his conscious control. Now: the mechanisms by which he succeeded are as opaque as the walls of the Death Star itself were. Nothing is easy anymore.

He takes a breath, and looks at Anakin. Worst of all, if Anakin knew this weakness. Would Anakin abandon him, abandon them both and return to the Dark Side if he knew? Logic suggests otherwise—Anakin chose Luke before the trial with the Emperor—but emotion has coiled tight around that idea and chained it under his ribs. If Luke cannot be strong enough for them both, all is lost; and Luke, right now, very much doubts his ability to be strong at all. 

Anakin looks back. If he reads or intuits any of Luke’s distress, he says nothing of it. “Ready?”

Luke lets go of that breath. “Show me,” he says, and Anakin flashes one of those slow crinkle-eyed grins, and does.

Luke struggles with the assemblage of his lightsaber. He does. It would be a lie to pretend otherwise, a wrong thing. He cannot quite get hold of the Force, cannot bend its will to his own. It slips from his seeking grasp like running water. 

“Enough,” Anakin says eventually, face faintly etched in a frown. “This isn’t working. We’ll try again later.”

“I’m sorry,” Luke gasps, the strain of reaching for the Force leaving him breathless.

“You don’t have to apologize,” Anakin says immediately. He lays his hand on Luke’s shoulder, the weight reassuring. “You’ll get it eventually. You just have to focus.”

“I’ve been focusing,” Luke grouses, but he leans back, catches the bottle of water Anakin tosses to him. It’s a relief to take a break. 

“You’ll get it eventually,” Anakin says again, still reassuring, and in this instant, Luke sees clearly how Ahsoka could still love him, as she might an older brother, despite everything; how kind a Master he had been, how understanding, how encouraging. Elements of this had emerged over the years, of course—Anakin, demonstrating a new saber technique; Anakin, programming training droids; Anakin, didactically enabling Luke to find his own answers. But it’s one thing to experience this in the midst of progress, and another in the moment of failure. Abruptly, Luke wants to cry. He shuffles over next to Anakin, and leans his head on his father’s shoulder. After a few seconds, Anakin’s arm comes around him, a half-hug, no less comforting for the absence of another limb. 

“It’ll be alright, Luke,” Anakin whispers to the crown of his head. “It’ll be alright.”

It feels like a lie.

They drop out of hyperspace on the third day. Naboo blooms like a water rose before them, indescribably beautiful, haloed by Star Destroyer wreckage and Alliance ships around its moons. Even from space, from orbit, where every planet looks beautiful, Naboo stands out. Luke swallows. 

In the pilot’s seat, Anakin is tense, unreadable. When was the last time he was on Naboo? What memories resurface for him at its sight? An image comes to Luke’s mind, coalescing out of the emptiness of space: Mom, radiant but afraid in pearl-laden white; Threepio and Artoo bearing witness; the discomfort of a new prosthetic hand against her soft palm. 

The ship’s comm trills suddenly, breaking the memory like mirror-glass. Anakin takes a breath, releases it, and taps the comm channel.

 _“Unidentified ship,”_ says a woman’s smooth, cool voice. _“Please identify yourself and state your business on Naboo.”_

Anakin opens his mouth, but Luke leans forward.

“My name is Luke Skywalker-Naberrie,” he says, “and I’ve come to see my mother.”

Silence for one long, shocked moment. _“Please stand by,”_ the woman says finally.

They wait. Anakin says, quiet, “You should have let me answer, Luke. They won’t like my showing up unannounced.”

“At least you’ll get to show up,” Luke says.

Anakin swallows. “I meant what I said. I don’t want you to worry about me, Luke. Whatever happens, I’ll be fine.”

“I know,” Luke says. He intends to make sure of it.

The woman’s voice returns abruptly. _“An escort is being provided to you. Please follow it to the Royal Palace in Theed. Do not attempt to land elsewhere.”_

“Understood,” Luke says. A squadron of X-wings disembarks from one of the Mon Cal warships and surrounds them; the ship furthest to the front signals from its wings, and Anakin shudders, and eases the throttle forward. 

Luke can’t sit still. His foot taps anxiously on the floor; his fingers strum on his thighs. He shivers. Three years and some months, weeks, days—since last he’s seen his mothers, his sister. Uncle Obi-Wan and Socks, and Barriss, too. All the Aunties. The nearer he gets to seeing them again, the twitchier he becomes. He has never been so aware of his isolation as he is in its last moments. 

Anakin says nothing, but his eyes watch him from their corners. His piloting never falters, and neither does his attention, as they approach the planet; as they break atmosphere and descend through layers of clouds; as they bear upon Theed and its domed palaces and its great waterfalls; as they enter the Royal hangar. 

Anakin sets the post-flight checks to run, and catches Luke by the arm as Luke squirms out of his seat. “Here,” he says, and hands Luke his blue lightsaber and the disabled red one. “Take these.”

“You’ll be okay,” Luke says, a question and a promise at once, and Anakin half-smiles. It doesn’t reach his eyes. 

“Yeah, Luke,” he says, “I’ll be okay.”

Luke swallows. He grabs his satchel, lightsaber components tucked securely inside, and makes for the exit and the ramp. Anakin does not stop him, just walks slowly a few steps behind him. 

He’s bouncing on his toes as the ramp lowers, and skids down its length before it’s reached the hangar floor, only to be met by two familiar figures, hands on their weapons, ready to intercept him: Obi-Wan and Eirtaé. Auntie Eirtaé holds her stance a fraction longer than Obi-Wan, but Luke barely has time to register this; Obi-Wan drops to his knees before him and seizes Luke in a fierce hug. 

“Luke,” he says, like a prayer, “Luke—” And then he’s standing and turning and calling, hoarsely, “Padmé—it’s him—” and Luke sees his mother for the first time in years.

Mom stands still, stricken as though by lightning at the sight of him; she is pale with the Naboo ceremonial cosmetics, but her hands are as white as her face, her eyes huge over blue woad tears, her lips colorless except for the red scar of remembrance. Mama is right beside her, their hands clasped together; she is similarly frozen. And then they, as one, burst into motion, heavy skirts clutched above running feet and Luke, too, runs to meet them. 

“Mom!” he shouts, “Mama!” He can’t think clear enough to think that Anakin doesn’t know about Mama, that Luke has never told him, never warned him; nothing seems to matter less in this moment. All that matters is how he crashes into Mom’s skirts, how they stumble together and fall to the hangar floor, how Mom is weeping, her hands so careful on Luke’s face; how Mama encircles him with her arms so that he is utterly surrounded by his mothers and their love for him, the scent of green tea and lilia blossom soap, the silky sleeves of Mom’s dress, the stiffer fabric of Mama’s Alliance uniform.

And then Obi-Wan flinches in alarmed recognition, turning back to the shuttle, Eirtaé only a second behind him, and Luke fights his way from his mothers’ arms, shouting, “Don’t hurt him!”

Anakin is a dark silhouette on the boarding ramp, his eyes intent upon Mom and Luke and Mama, his expression impossible to read. But he kneels when directed, puts his arms behind his head; allows himself to be handcuffed without resistance. Luke tugs on Obi-Wan’s arm: “I have his lightsabers.”

“Give them to me,” Obi-Wan says, and Luke surrenders the weapons. “Padmé—”

“Take him to the cells,” Mom says, upright and bloodless again, eyes bright with anger. “Maximum security.”

“Luke,” Anakin says, and Mama calls his name sharply, too. 

“Remember what I said, Luke,” Anakin says, more loudly, as Mama catches Luke’s shoulder and tugs him firmly, but gently, back to her and Mom.

“Don’t hurt him!” Luke pleads again, grabbing at Mom’s arm; she looks down at him, and her face softens. 

“We won’t,” she says. “We’re not the Empire, Luke.” Then: “Obi-Wan—ensure it.”

Anakin’s lightsabers clipped to his belt, Obi-Wan nods in acknowledgement, and Luke watches his father being led away, his arms bound, in chains again. He swallows, hates himself for bringing this about; and then his mother gathers him to her again, and Luke lets fall every tear he’s buried deep within him since that dusty day on Cyphar, when his life changed forever.

INTERLUDE: OBI-WAN

The descent to the maximum security detention level, deep in the foundation of the Palace, is silent. Vader—Anakin, perhaps, possibly—makes no move to resist him or Eirtaé or any of the other four guards escorting him. Hands clasped in front of him, eyes forward, he makes no sound.

It’s uncanny. Obi-Wan has never known Anakin to be silent for long, even when imprisoned. But now he is as a walking corpse, unflinching, unspeaking. 

The silence continues as they reach the maximum security level; as they lead Anakin, if he can be called that, into the last cell on the empty row; as they remove his restraints and enable the forcefield that will keep him imprisoned. The weight of Anakin’s two sabers is like another corpse on Obi-Wan’s belt. Eirtaé claps him on the shoulder once, companionably, and leads the guards away. Obi-Wan stays, unmoving, unable to move. 

Anakin watches him with those beloved blue eyes, waiting. Obi-Wan knows he waits for him, but still cannot move. It is a long, excruciating moment before he can bring himself to speak. And even then, he cannot ask the question he most wants to ask.

“Why are you here, Anakin?”

Anakin’s face twists in a scoff, as though he had expected something else and is disappointed in Obi-Wan’s inability to express it. Obi-Wan does not hold this against him. Obi-Wan, too, is disappointed in himself. 

“Luke asked me to come,” he says. “So I came.”

The words wound as effectively as any saber. “That’s all it took,” Obi-Wan says dully. “For someone you love to ask you to come with them.”

Anakin opens his mouth, shuts it. Frowns. “You never asked.”

“I _begged_ ,” Obi-Wan says. “While you were strangling your wife on Mustafar. I begged you to stop, to come with us.”

Anakin’s frown deepens. Ungraciously, he says, “I wasn’t at my best then.”

Obi-Wan stares at him disbelievingly. “Is that all you have to say for yourself?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to apologize! To me, to Padmé, to—to the Republic, to your son!”

“For trying to save their lives?”

“For betraying everything we held dear!”

“ _I_ was supposed to be held dear,” Anakin snaps. “I stayed loyal—”

“You’ve spent the last thirteen years fighting on opposite sides of a war! Did it never occur to you that you could be wrong?”

Anakin says nothing to that, but his eyes are stormier than Kamino. And that’s when Obi-Wan realizes: Anakin knew he was wrong. On some deep-buried level, he knew it well. He just couldn’t face it, whether because of pride or a need to have not sacrificed in vain or both.

Obi-Wan swallows. “I hope,” he says, clipped, “that you will have time to reflect while you await trial.” With that, he turns and heads back to the guard’s station at the end of the corridor. 

Anakin does not call after him.

“What happens now?”

Luke’s finally stopped crying, and they’ve finally moved on from the Naboo hangar, but he’s too preoccupied to be caught breathless by the elegance of the Palace. Mom and Mama each hold one of his hands, on either side of him. At his question, Mom’s grip tightens. She stops and kneels before him. 

“Luke,” she says. “My son. I am sorry for this. You will need to tell us what happened to you, and anything else you can about what you observed of the Empire.”

He hadn’t really expected anything else. “Will Auntie Dormé debrief me?”

“Dormé’s at Mandalore,” Mama says gently. “General Draven is here; he and Elié, who leads the House of Tides, will debrief you. And we’ll be with you the entire time.”

The loss of Dormé pangs him. But not as much as another loss. “When can I see Leia?”

Force, it feels so good to say her name, to not have to guard against thinking of her. But both of his mothers stiffen at her name, and fear crawls up like frost inside him. 

“Leia isn’t here,” Mom says, after a complicated look with Mama, and a great pit yawns wide in Luke’s abdomen. “She’s safe—she’s with Ahsoka. She had a vision of your father, and we feared he might have discovered her, so we sent her away to protect her.”

“She’s not here,” Luke repeats numbly. Abruptly his legs give out from under him; he stumbles to the floor, bruising his knees on the unforgiving Nubian marble. Leia isn’t here. She’s still out there, out of reach, among the stars.

“Luke—we’ll send for her,” Mom says, kneeling down with him. “Now that you’re back, that Anakin is in custody—the danger will have passed. We’ll send for her. You’ll see her soon.”

But she isn’t _here_. He’s waited so long, and come so far, and she _isn’t here._

He’s still alone.

“Luke,” Mama is saying, the lilt of her accent only a distant comfort, “it’ll be alright, my love. You’ll see her soon enough. We’ll send word to Ahsoka right away.” Her hand strokes through his hair, smoothing the strands that have come loose from his habitual braid. 

But he can’t feel anything. Leia isn’t here, and Anakin is imprisoned, and even with Obi-Wan and his mothers, Luke can’t help but wonder: was he right to have come back?

Mom and Mama, once he’s able to stand, lead Luke to a suite of rooms he instinctively recognizes as theirs. All the telltale signs of the Aunties are there: the neat spread of bedrolls, the catalogues of briefings stacked throughout the rooms, the scents of perfumes and of blossom soap, and green tea from a half-drunk cup by his mothers’ bed. Eirtaé’s weapons fastidiously arranged along one wall; Moteé’s blasters and well-worn datapads; Rabé’s flimsiplast sketchbook and charcoals, and the gleam of a vibroblade half-tucked under her pillow. 

The rooms are almost obsessively tidy, the way Luke remembers the _Spark_ being kept, but Mom says, “Forgive the mess—you caught us quite by surprise—” as she leads them to a sitting room, away from the main hall and bedroom. There, a thin-nosed man awaits them, as does a woman with sleek black hair. Davits Draven and Elié of the House of Tides, Luke surmises, and Mama’s quiet introduction confirms that only seconds later. 

Behind Draven and Elié stand two more people: a man with dark hair and darker eyes over a hooked nose; and Asajj Ventress.

Luke stops in sheer shock.

“I thought you were on Mandalore,” he says. 

Asajj tilts her head, evaluative, and watches him unblinkingly. “I was,” she says, and only that.

“You remember Asajj Ventress, then,” Mama says. “And this is Cassian Andor, one of Davits’ agents.”

Cassian Andor bows his head slightly, but his dark eyes never leave Luke’s. 

“Sit down, Luke,” Mom whispers, settling on one of the couches and patting the space next to her. Luke goes to her, glad of the warmth of her hand on his, of Mama sitting on his other side. Even without Leia—even so, it’s hard not to feel safe with his mothers around him. 

Draven and Elié, once Mom and Mama have sat, take their seats on the couch opposite them; Draven sets a recorder down on the low table between them. Behind the other couch, Cassian Andor stands, alert; Asajj Ventress lounges against a wall, posture as careless as can be, but her eyes never leave Luke. 

Draven clears his throat. He taps the recorder to start it, and leans back only so far as to rest his elbows on his knees, attentive and focused. 

“Start from the beginning,” he says, and Luke does.

He talks for hours. Auntie Rabé appears, about twenty minutes in, with tea and fruit and sandwiches, and vanishes again just as quickly, pausing only long enough to set down her tray and squeeze Luke’s shoulder in welcome. 

He can’t stop, now that he’s started. The words pull out of him inexorably, incessantly, one after another. He talks about his time on the _Devastator_ , the clones who kept him company, Bo, Appo, and Fox; he talks about the jumps from Vjun to Mustafar to Mandalore, and the years he spent there, watching the battle drag bloodily on and on and on, not knowing how to signal for help, not knowing if it was worth doing. He talks about the salle and Anakin’s teaching him to fight; he talks about the workbench, about trying to distract himself from Concordia’s funereal dirge by making things, toys and components. 

At last, he comes to the Death Star. The words dry up in his throat. He has to drain his now-cold cup of tea to force them out. 

“It’s a weapon,” he says. “They tested it on asteroids. But it’s meant for something bigger. I don’t know what. I think I disabled it. A—my father will know more.”

“Why did he come with you?” Draven asks bluntly.

Luke blinks. “I asked him to.”

“You asked, and he said yes, just like that.”

Luke opens his mouth, closes it. He doesn’t know how to convey the torturous uncertainty between the ask and the answer, the conviction that Anakin was sincere, has been nothing but sincere with him. It’s a conviction borne of the Force, of course it is; but it’s borne of intimate knowledge, too, the kind that only comes from living with someone, at their mercy, for years. 

“Yes,” Luke says, at a loss. “I asked him to come with me and bring me home. He agreed.”

“Luke,” says Elié, very gently, “you must understand our concern. Darth Vader—”

“Anakin,” Luke interrupts. “His name is Anakin.”

Mom’s hand tightens abruptly on his own, and relaxes just as quickly. 

“…Anakin, then,” Elié says gracefully, “has had ample opportunity to abandon the Empire. To come back to—” Here, she glances discreetly at Mom. “—to his family. That he does so now must be regarded with suspicion. How did you convince him to come?”

Luke swallows. “I told him that I loved him.” It’s all that he can think to say. 

Elié looks to Mom, apparently awaiting some kind of confirmation; Luke can’t see if it’s given, and Elié eventually looks away. 

“I think that’s enough,” Mom says. “Sabé? Would you please take Luke to get some rest?”

“Of course,” Mama murmurs. “Come, Luke.”

Luke rises with her, follows her to the door. He looks back at Mom, and she’s watching him, too, something like concern furrowed in her brow. But then the door closes, and she’s gone.

INTERLUDE: PADMÉ

“It’s too easy,” Draven says, the moment the door _snicks_ shut behind Luke and Sabé. “This is some kind of Imperial ploy. Vader was sent here to kill you. It’s the only explanation that makes sense.”

“Unless Luke was telling the truth,” Padmé says. Unable to sit any longer, she rises and walks to one of the tall windows, staring out at the reflecting pool. 

“My lady,” Draven says, something very close to pity in his voice, “three and a half years is a long time.”

She whirls on him, temper abruptly frayed to the point of unraveling altogether. “You don’t have to remind _me.”_

“What my colleague is suggesting,” Elié says delicately, “is that—”

“I know what he’s suggesting,” Padmé snaps. “My son is not an agent of the Empire.”

From the back of the room: help, dubiously. “He was telling the truth,” Asajj Ventress says, mouth twisting as though the words are sour. “As far as he knew it to be true. But Draven has a point.” She raises a hand to forestall Padmé’s anger. “Vader cannot be trusted. He could be planning to kill or kidnap you, my lady. I think that far more likely than his having returned to the Light at the request of his son.”

It’s rational. It’s all perfectly rational. But doubt eats at her. “Three years is a long time,” Padmé murmurs. Thirteen years longer still. Abruptly, she decides. “I’m going to talk to Anakin. The rest of you: I want to know everything about the Death Star. Everything.”

“It would be helpful if we could speak to…Skywalker,” Draven observes.

“You can talk to him as soon as I’m done,” Padmé promises. “Lady Ventress—walk with me.”

Ventress slinks behind her in nearly perfect silence. But for the whisper of her robe along the marble tiles, Padmé would forget she was there at all. But Padmé can’t forget. “What do you make of this?” she asks quietly as they make their way to the detention level.

“I told you what I make of it.”

“I mean—with Leia. With your Force-instinct. They came on your heels, so soon after your message. What does this mean for Leia?”

Ventress is quiet for a long moment. “I sense she is still in need, my lady. Though not in danger.”

“I want you to rendezvous with Ahsoka,” Padmé decides. “And bring my daughter home.”

“Even with the danger that Vader represents?”

She pauses. “Perhaps not,” she says quietly. “I will need to discuss it with Sabé. And we will need to learn what we can from Anakin.”

“You still call him by that name, after everything?” Ventress asks.

She’s at a loss to explain it. So many, even Obi-Wan, have been eager to speak of Vader and Anakin as though they were two separate individuals. She has never been able to do so. At his best and at his worst, fighting for the Republic or enacting its demise, he has never been anything but himself. 

“I do,” she says finally. She goes the rest of the way alone.

Obi-Wan is standing guard. He springs to attention, into action, at the sight of her. “Padmé,” he says, “you shouldn’t be here.” He shuts his mouth with a click of teeth, as though he could bite the words back.

“I have more right than anyone to be here,” she says, speaking kindly with effort. 

His shoulders drop in acknowledgement; she presses her hand to his elbow above the prosthetic to soften the blow of her words. 

“He’s at the end of the hall,” Obi-Wan says finally, and Padmé lets go of his arm, and goes to confront her husband.

The years have not altered Anakin significantly. There are faint lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth, but he is as handsome as he ever was. The waves of his hair fall to his shoulders, and no longer; he stands when he sees her, his hands going to clasp behind his back. He wears black: black robes, black synthleather tabard, black synthleather boots. His eyes are clear, and blue, and intent upon her. It’s all she can do not to tremble, but she shivers, and his eyes track the movement.

“Anakin,” she says, and he steps forward once, as though he cannot help himself. 

“Padmé,” he says, low. 

She wants to shake her head to clear it; she holds herself painfully still, determined to give no ground. “Why are you here, Anakin?”

“Obi-Wan didn’t tell you?” There’s a sardonic twist to his mouth at the words; she hates it with gut instinct. 

“I didn’t ask him,” Padmé says. “I asked you.”

He cants his head to the side, stares at her, his eyes inscrutable slits. “Luke asked me to bring him home. I brought him home.”

“That’s not it,” she whispers, “that can’t be it.”

“Search your feelings, Padmé,” Anakin says, old Jedi lore. She bristles at it, at the suggestion. 

“Why else are you here?”

“When have you ever known me to have an ulterior motive?”

“I haven’t known you since the Empire rose,” she retorts. “Thirteen years is a long time.”

“Almost fourteen, now,” he says. “Since the birth of our son.” Quieter: “Padmé. Why didn’t you tell me?”

Of all the questions he could have asked, she is least prepared to answer this one. Words clamor on her tongue and fall back down her throat unspoken. At last she says, “What was there to tell? You knew I was pregnant. You knew I was due.”

“I thought—” he begins.

“I know what you thought. I intended you to think it.”

Frustration now in the blue of his eyes. “I’m his father,” Anakin says. “You should have told me.”

“And exposed him to Palpatine? Never.” He opens his mouth to speak, but Padmé suddenly knows exactly what to say, even as she knows how much it will hurt. Cuttingly, she says, “You forfeited all rights to be called ‘father’ when you destroyed his future.”

“I was trying to ensure a future for all of us!” 

“You failed. More completely than you can know.”

“Evidently not,” he snarls. He stalks the limits of his cell, the length of the force-field keeping him imprisoned. “You’ve been undoing every sacrifice I’ve ever made since before he was born.”

“I’ve been rebuilding the future!” Padmé shouts. “I’ve been fighting so that my son can have a life! While you’ve been off murdering your way through the Galaxy—”

“Like there’s not blood on your hands—”

“Of course there is! _You put it there!”_

He stops at that; his eyes glint gold. She cannot see his hands, still clasped behind his back. All too clearly, she suddenly recalls the malevolent pressure of the Force around her throat on Mustafar all those years ago. Her hand rises to her neck without her permission, to ward off nothing. Anakin steps back, then, his eyes blue again as they drop to the floor.

“I never wanted this,” he mutters. “I never wanted blood on your hands. I never wanted us to be apart. But we are, now. Is it so hopeless for us?”

Padmé looks at him. “There is no ‘us’ anymore,” she says quietly. “There cannot be.”

“Because you’re with Sabé now. Long enough that Luke calls to her as a mother.”

“He told you?”

“He didn’t have to. I saw you in the hangar.”

Of course he had. “What did Luke tell you?” she wonders.

“That you might not forgive me.”

“He had to tell you that?”

Anakin shrugs. “I…hoped.” He looks at her, long and intent. “What are you doing here, Padmé?”

All his questions catch her off guard today. What is she doing here? Answers spring to the tip of her tongue and die there, too honest, not honest enough. She struggles, and hopes her face does not betray her. 

“I hoped, too,” she says at last. It’s as honest as she can be. As honest as he deserves. 

“Will you still?”

Her temper flares. “You don’t get to ask that of me. Not after everything.” From the corner of her eye, she sees Draven and Elié step from the turbolift into the hall. Her time is up—in any case, there is nothing more to say.

Well, one thing, perhaps, that she never got the chance to say the last time. “Goodbye, Anakin.”

He calls after her as she makes her way up the hall past the other, empty cells; she does not turn around; she does not answer. She goes instead to Obi-Wan, still standing guard, and falls into his arms, desperate for the understanding of a witness to this and all of Anakin’s failings. 

Luke, exhausted but unable to sleep, lies awake in the bed in the darkened room Mama had led him to. She sits in a chair at the bed’s foot, expression distant, posture attentive. Luke sits up.

“Mama,” he whispers, “what’s going to happen to him?”

She turns her eyes to him, calm and even. “I expect,” she says, “that he’ll be tried for war crimes, and imprisoned until his trial.”

“And then?”

Kindly, she says, “Your mother doesn’t believe in the death penalty, Luke. Lifelong imprisonment, I expect, is what awaits him.”

The answer sits poorly with Luke. It’s hard to consider Anakin, whose Force signature sings out like a clarion call, whose presence simmers with the vibrancy of potential action, imprisoned in a cell for life, two meters by two meters, barely enough space to stretch, let alone practice lightsaber forms. 

“Luke,” Mama says softly. He turns his attention back to her. “May I ask—did you mean it, when you told him you loved him?”

He hesitates. “It’s hard not to love someone when you understand them,” he murmurs.

“And you understand him?”

He looks away, can’t bear to see her face. “Is it wrong to love him?”

He hears her rise, feels her weight settle onto the bed by him, the shadow she casts. “My son,” Mama says, “it is never wrong to love.”

Tears prick at his eyes, and he curls into her, leaning against her frame, so different from Anakin’s. “I love you, too, Mama.”

She says nothing, just strokes his hair; eventually, he falls asleep. 

He wakes when the door opens, to find the room bright with sunlight and Auntie Moteé with her hands full with a tray. On the tray are pastries, fruit, tea, all his favorites. A lump grows in his throat. 

She sets the tray down next to him on the bed. “How are you, Luke?” she says warmly.

He sets aside the _I don’t know_ that wants out. “Hungry.”

“Understandably,” Moteé says, “you slept for nearly twenty hours. You must have been exhausted.”

Twenty hours, and he still feels exhausted. He picks up a pastry studded with nuts and tears off a chunk with his fingers. 

“Your mothers have arranged for you to see the Court physician, once you’re dressed,” Moteé says. “Sabé will accompany you. And then they’d like to have tea with you this afternoon.”

The pastry is faintly sweet, nuts crunching between his teeth. He’s eaten more than half of it without realizing. Moteé pours him a cup of tea; the scent wafts up and over him, like home. 

“When can I see my father?” he asks.

Moteé stills, her head tilted like a bird’s. “Is that something you want?”

Luke can’t bear to think of the alternative. “Yes.”

Moteé hums. “You will need to ask your mothers,” she says.

“They’ll say no.”

“They want to protect you. Is it so unbearable to let them do so?”

They haven’t been able to protect him since Cyphar. Luke looks away instead of answering. 

“Come,” says Moteé gently, as he finishes the pastry. “Eat your breakfast, wash up, and I’ll take you to Sabé.”

Mama meets them at the Court physician’s office. She’s in her Alliance uniform again, a deep blue-grey jacket and pants tucked into knee-high boots. She bends down and hugs Luke when she sees him.

“I’m sorry I could not stay with you,” she whispers to him.

“Duty calls,” Luke says dryly. 

“Always,” she says, and nods to Moteé, and leads him into the office. 

The physician is an elderly Gungan; they ask him to step on the scale, to recollect his sleeping and eating patterns, the amount of exercise he’s accustomed to getting. They take his heart rate, blood pressure, and a blood sample, as well as x-rays; they measure practically every centimeter of him. 

“He’s fine,” they tell Mama, waiting outside. “A little underweight, but he is healthy and unharmed.”

Mama exhales, almost a sob, and hugs Luke to her. He clings back to her for a long moment; when she releases him, her eyes damp with tears, Luke says: “I want to see him.”

She goes rigid. “No,” she says. 

“He’s my father. I have—”

“He’s not well, Luke,” Mama says urgently. “He’s not—he’s not a good person. You’ve been subjected to him long enough. You don’t have to see him anymore.”

“But I want to,” Luke says.

Mama withdraws, looks at him long and hard. “My son,” she says, stroking a hand over his hair. “You are made of kindness. You are the most empathetic person I know. Do you want to see him, or does he want to be seen?”

Luke opens his mouth, shuts it. He has no idea what to say to that. _Yes_ , he thinks, is the answer, the true one, but it’s not one that he thinks will change Mama’s mind. 

She squeezes his shoulder. “Come,” she says, “let’s go to tea. Your mother will be waiting for us.”

Mom isn’t waiting, but she arrives within minutes of them. “I’m sorry,” she says, leaning down to kiss Mama, to hug Luke. “The meeting ran over—I came as soon as I could.”

“It’s fine, my love,” Mama murmurs, and pours the tea. It steams in the air, each molecule of water glittering like a star. Luke looks away before he can become entranced. 

Mom sits on the couch opposite, accepts the teacup Mama offers her and wraps her hands around it gratefully. “How are you, Luke?”

Everyone keeps asking this, and he _knows_ why, he knows, but it’s starting to grate. “I’m fine.”

Mom’s eyes flicker to Mama. Looking back at him, she says, gentle, “It’s okay if you’re not fine.”

Does she want him to be—traumatized, broken, fragile? No, of course not, he knows that, but—but still. “I am fine, though.”

“Alright,” Mom says, still gentle. 

He senses that she disbelieves him. He looks down at his tea. “I want to see him.”

When he looks up again, Mom has gone still. “Absolutely not,” she says.

“Why?” Luke asks plaintively. “Everyone keeps saying that—but why?”

Mom sets her tea down in its saucer on the low table between the couches. “Luke…your father is not a good person. He may have been good to you, in his way, but he is not a good person, and I don’t want you—subjected to him any longer. It breaks my heart that you were with him as long as you were—”

“But you left me with him,” Luke says. “You left me. You started a war to get me back, but you left me with him in the meantime, and that means—that means you must have trusted him enough to leave me in his keeping. So why can’t I see him now?”

Mom’s eyes are starry with unshed tears. “I did leave you with him,” she admits quietly. “I trusted him not to hurt you directly. But, Luke, I had briefings every day from Mandalore—Lady Ventress told me of the visions she had of you—”

“Does this absolve you?”

 _“Luke,”_ Mama says sharply.

They’re Mom’s words, her lesson imparted, turned back like a mirror to her. She swallows.

“I did everything I could,” Mom says, pale. “I am—sorrier than you know that it wasn’t enough. That I couldn’t protect you when you most needed protecting. But I am going to protect you now, Luke. I know it’s too late, that it’s not enough, but it’s what I have, what I can do, so I’m going to do it.”

Obi-Wan finds him later, lying on his belly in the garden around the reflecting pool, watching the faint ripples of the water as the air moves above it.

“Luke,” he says quietly.

Luke looks up and lurches to his feet. “Uncle Obi-Wan,” he says, and runs the meter separating them until he can hug his uncle. 

“I’m sorry I left you,” Luke says, meaning those years ago in the dusty Cyphar market. “I’m sorry I didn’t do what you told me.” His eyes catch on the glove Obi-Wan wears over what must be an advanced prosthetic where his bones once grew. 

“It’s alright,” Obi-Wan promises. He wears kindness like a wound on his face. “I survived. And so did you. It’s alright.”

Luke gives into tears at that, wiping them hurriedly away as quickly as they fall. 

“Three years,” Obi-Wan says softly. “Nearly four. A lifetime, it must seem to you.”

“I’m fine,” Luke says automatically.

Obi-Wan looks at him, long and slow. “Who are you defending when you say that, Luke?”

Luke scuffs his boot on the tiled pathway, and only scuffs the tiles. He kneels down to rub away the mark with his thumb. “Someone should defend him,” he mutters.

“That someone doesn’t have to be you.”

“They won’t let me see him.”

“I know.”

“What do you think about it?”

“I think,” says Obi-Wan, “that they have every reason to ensure the two of you never meet again.”

Luke is suddenly and blindingly angry. He waits a long moment until the anger dissipates like mist off the surface of the reflecting pool. “He promised me he’d help me finish my lightsaber.”

Anakin hadn’t promised that, must have known that was no promise he’d be able to keep. But Luke wants him to have promised. It does not taste like a lie. 

“You’re working on a lightsaber,” exclaims Obi-Wan. “Will you show me?”

An effective deflection, but a deflection nonetheless. Luke squints at him, makes sure Obi-Wan knows that Luke knows what Obi-Wan is doing, and then leads them back to his room. His satchel is on one of the tables by his bed, no doubt plucked from the floor by one of the Aunties or his mothers; he feels a pang of embarrassment at the thought, and resolves to do better. 

Inside the satchel, collected in a soft leather compartmentalized pouch, are the lightsaber components. Tucked at its heart is the shard of kyber crystal from the Death Star’s heart. Obi-Wan leans over it curiously. Luke wonders what he hears from the crystal, if he hears anything; but Obi-Wan simply leans back and says, “A powerful crystal.”

Luke knows that very well. “I can’t get it all to fit together,” he confesses.

“It’s a difficult piece of meditation. I understand how you might struggle with it.” He picks up the stabilizing ring and examines it. “Did you forge this yourself?”

“My father helped.”

“He always was good at that,” Obi-Wan muses. “I recall you, too, were quite an adept mechanic.”

“I learned a lot from him.”

“Oh?”

“Obi-Wan—” Luke hesitates. “I did something, when we escaped. With the Force. But I don’t know how I did it.”

Obi-Wan guides him to the bench at the foot of his bed; they sit. “Tell me.”

Luke swallows. “The Emperor—appeared. In a holo. He…he threw lightning at me.”

“Luke,” Obi-Wan whispers, stricken, but Luke goes on.

“I caught it,” he says, “in my hand. And I held it there, and I used it to—to do whatever it was I did to the Death Star.”

Obi-Wan strokes his beard. “Master Yoda knows how to catch Force-lightning in his hands,” he says slowly, “though I do not. I must consult with him; I do not know how to guide you except to ask: was it the Light or the Dark that fueled you?”

“I don’t know,” Luke says haltingly. “I—I think it was the Light, but I’m not sure.”

“After so long in the Dark, it would have been very difficult to tell,” Obi-Wan says, as though that’s any comfort. 

Luke shivers. That’s what he’s afraid of. He stares at the kyber crystal; under the half-light of the room, it glitters dangerously. 

“Come,” says Obi-Wan, “let’s see if we can assemble your saber.” He crouches to sit cross-legged on the floor, laying out the leather pouch and its components precisely on the woven carpet. Luke sits opposite him, watching him work. As Obi-Wan places each component down, in the order in which it’s meant to be assembled, he speaks softly, outlining the role of each piece, its importance to the whole saber. 

“Now focus,” Obi-Wan says. Luke sits up straight, his legs crossed like Obi-Wan’s, his hands resting loosely on his knees. “The Force is all around you. It moves through you. Its will is your own. Find yourself in it; find your lightsaber through it.”

The Force comes more easily to Luke with Obi-Wan guiding him. He imagines, though he’s never had the experience, that it’s like standing in the midst of a river, or in the eye of a sandstorm, a thousand currents flowing around him, and danger in every one of them. He trails a hand through them tentatively, feeling how they part around him or sift to incorporate him. In his mind’s eye, he sees his saber coming together, each part of the hilt floating up to surround that green crystal, and he sees it completed, as though in a vision; but his concentration breaks, and he opens his eyes to see the crystal and the components clattering to the ground. 

Obi-Wan is watching him closely. “I sense you are afraid, Luke,” he says carefully, after a moment’s consideration, and the words ring in Luke like a struck bell. “What are you afraid of?”

Luke shakes his head, wordless. He can’t articulate it, can’t begin to express it. 

“Then,” Obi-Wan says, “you must discover the source of your fear and confront it. Only then will you be able to forge your lightsaber.”

Dinner is quiet. His mothers and the Aunties and Obi-Wan keep up a steady stream of conversation, but Luke cannot bring himself to join in. Obi-Wan’s diagnosis of the problem with his lightsaber haunts him. He can practically hear Yoda’s voice in his head: _fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, hate leads to the Dark Side._

When he closes his eyes in bed that night, he sees the crystal, and hears the Death Star’s screams.

He doesn’t sleep.

It’s Auntie Rabé who brings him breakfast the next morning, but she can’t stay longer than to give him a hug and set the tray on his bed. “Eat all of that,” she says to him, and “Your mothers are occupied with the Alliance this morning; the Lady Ventress will accompany you today,” and vanishes in a whirl of sapphire silks before he can ask any questions.

Luke mulls it over as he eats. Asajj Ventress is a capable fighter, and a Force-user; she will be able to protect him against most anything that tries to hurt him. That must be why his mothers chose her to watch him today. But Ventress is also unpredictable, and dangerous. There may be things she would allow that his mothers won’t. 

He finishes breakfast and dresses: somehow, his mothers have been able to provide a wardrobe of practical, comfortable, elegant clothes, like Mama’s Alliance uniform, but in a variety of colors and combinations. There is no black to be seen. The choices paralyze him. After long moments of indecision, he grabs a suit in blue-grey like Mama’s. 

At the door to the suite, he pauses, and cautiously pushes it open. Asajj Ventress is on the wall opposite, lounging and louche. She glances up at him as he emerges. He opens his mouth; she beats him to it.

“I’ve been given explicit orders not to take you to your father,” she says, bored, “so don’t ask.”

Luke closes his mouth, then says, mulishly, “Good morning.”

She almost smiles at that. “Good morning, young Skywalker.”

“It’s ‘Skywalker-Naberrie,’ actually.”

“Good for you,” she drawls. But it’s clear that she has no intention of saying his full name. Luke gives it up. 

“What are we doing today?” he asks.

“I’m at your disposal,” Ventress says with a sardonic half-bow. “My duty is to keep you safe and out of trouble. Otherwise, you’re free to do as you like, and I will be your shadow.”

Luke considers this. “I’d like to walk in the gardens,” he decides. After so long cooped up on the _Devastator_ or the Death Star, he aches for the wide expanse of sky and sun and the sense of growing things in the Force. 

“By all means,” Ventress says, and leads the way. 

He watches her as she walks, the careless confidence of her gait, the strength in her shoulders. 

“What is it you want to know, young Skywalker?” She sounds bored again.

He opens his mouth and a question springs from him fully formed. “How do you navigate between the Light and the Dark?”

Whatever she had expected him to ask, that evidently wasn’t it. She pauses, and looks over her shoulder at him. 

“Keep up,” she says eventually, and Luke half-jogs to keep pace with her. Silence reigns as they make their way to the gardens, but Luke can tell she hasn’t forgotten his question; she’s just thinking how best to answer.

They’ve been walking in the gardens for nearly a quarter of an hour before she speaks again. 

“You have patience,” she says, “unlike your father. That will serve you well in the Light.”

“He’s learned patience,” Luke mutters.

Ventress laughs, a raw, rusted sound. “Took him long enough.” She sobers quickly. “I’ve never thought about it,” she says at last. “Navigating between Light and Dark, that is. I’ve been trained in both. And each master forbade the use of the opposing side.”

“What do you use now?”

“The Dark Side.”

He flinches back from her at that, and she laughs again. 

Hesitantly, he asks, “Are you…joking?”

“Never,” she says seriously.

He mulls over her answer. “But…you’re not evil.”

“That, young Skywalker, depends entirely on your point of view.”

Luke frowns at her. “That’s a very Jedi-like thing to say.”

“But it’s the truth.” Ventress sits on a stone bench and allows him enough space to sit next to her. “I was what those you count friends and family would call ‘evil’ for a very long time. To some, it is all I will ever be.”

“But you’re not,” Luke objects. “You’re helping us. And your sabers aren’t red.”

“It takes more than a red saber to make someone evil, little Jedi,” Ventress says, warmth fleeing from her voice. “It’s about the choices you make. I have made cruel choices. I am learning to make ones that are less so.”

“But you need opportunity to make those choices,” Luke says. 

Ventress watches him through slitted eyes. “…One does.”

Luke turns to face her fully. “How,” he asks, “can you make better choices if you’re locked up?”

Ventress stares at him for a long moment, then rises gracefully. “It strikes me,” she says, “that this is an argument you should make to the Wellspring, not me.”

“She’s more comfortable with him making bad choices,” Luke says, hurrying after her. “So’s he. But he can change.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“He brought me home, didn’t he?”

She slows. “Why are you so sure he did that for you?”

Luke pauses. He’s never questioned the nature of Anakin’s choice. He questions it now, turning it from every angle like a crystal, to see how the answers refract. 

“Because,” he says at last, “he knew that this was the harder choice to make, and he made it anyway.”

“Hmm,” Ventress says, and nothing else for the rest of their walk. 

Later, he asks: “Will you spar with me?”

“You don’t have a lightsaber, little Jedi,” she says without looking up from her datapad. They’re in the library; Luke, after his first moments of awe, is becoming bored. 

“You have two,” he points out. She wears one at each hip.

At this, Ventress does look coldly up. “The last time another used my sabers, she lost them both. I don’t loan them out anymore.”

Luke bites his lip. “I used my father’s blue saber when I was with him,” he says. “I gave it to Obi-Wan.”

“That was foolish of you,” Ventress says, but she relents after a long moment, setting the datapad aside. “Let’s go find it, then.”

Obi-Wan is sequestered in meetings, like Luke’s mothers, so Ventress leads them down level after level, down stairs and more stairs, avoiding the turbolifts. The air grows damp the deeper they go; they’re below the waterfalls, Luke realizes, and the rivers, and he shivers.

“Is there a reason we’re avoiding the lifts?” he asks.

“Yes,” Ventress says.

He waits, but no further information is forthcoming. “Are you going to tell me what that reason is?”

“You’re a smart boy, or so I’m told. You can figure it out.”

Luke considers this. It takes him mere moments to arrive at a conclusion; he can’t believe it. “Are—are we going to the detention level?”

 _“I’m_ going to fetch your father’s lightsaber,” Ventress says pointedly. “What you do while my back is turned is entirely your own affair. But it will not be turned for long, young Skywalker, so my advice to you is to know what you are going to do with that time.”

“How many more levels?” He shivers now with anticipation.

“Just one.”

“You couldn’t have told me at the top of all these stairs?” Luke complains, but halfheartedly, already turning his attention to what he might do with the scant moments he has. His feet drag on the stairs now, desperate to eke out another half-minute’s consideration, but Ventress’ pace never slows, never falters. He ends up half-tripping down the stairs in an effort to keep up with her, but she catches him and rights him mid-stumble.

“Keep up,” she warns him, but she doesn’t look at him. 

They stop before a door. There is no further level to which one could descend. 

“How many on the other side?” Ventress asks him.

He focuses. “Two. One near, one farther.”

“Skywalker will be the nearer,” Ventress says. “His saber will be guarded at the desk. I will fetch it. Stay here.”

But he slips in behind her while her back is turned, and finds himself abruptly face to face with his father. 

Ventress continues down the hall, giving no indication that she knows Luke’s there; he seizes the opportunity with both hands, and turns to his father.

Anakin looks worse than Luke has ever seen him. Always a vibrant, electric presence, Anakin appears now shrunken in on himself. Dark circles rim his eyes. The scar across his right brow stands out, livid, against the pallor of his skin, made all the paler by the unrelenting black he wears. But he comes to life at the sight of Luke, stumbling upright and to the force-field keeping them separated. 

“Luke,” Anakin says, “what are you doing here?”

“What happened to you?” Luke demands in a whisper.

“I’m fine,” Anakin says, and frowns at him. “I have a hard time believing your mother allowed you down here.”

“She didn’t. Lady Ventress let me in.”

“So I see.” 

“I wanted to see you,” Luke says in a rush; from the corner of his eye, he can see Ventress accepting the saber and clipping it to her belt, where it jostles the others. “I’ve been trying—”

“You need to forget about me, Luke,” Anakin interrupts. A wry half-smile twists his mouth. “You need to let me go.”

Luke stares at him, aghast. “I won’t do that,” he says.

“You have to,” Anakin says; and then Ventress’ hand clasps Luke’s shoulder like a steel vice and steers him toward the door to the stairs. 

“Goodbye, Luke,” Anakin says, and Luke opens his mouth to scream at him, but Ventress is too quick, and has them through the door and up the stairs before he can gather his words together.

They climb stairs until Ventress decides they can catch a turbolift without arousing suspicion. “Still want to spar?” she asks.

Luke wants a lot of things. He wants to retreat to his room and weep; he wants to break things. He wants more than a stolen minute with his father; he wants the understanding of his mothers. 

“Sure,” he says, dry-eyed. 

He doesn’t know why he didn’t expect Ventress to be an underhanded, vicious opponent. She disarms him in less than a minute. Training droids never prepared him for this: the Force used in conjunction with the saber from an opponent skilled at hurling things at him. Anakin, always more focused on Luke’s proficiency with a lightsaber, or perhaps unwilling to use the Force as a weapon against his son, had never stooped to such tactics. But Ventress doesn’t hesitate, and soon Luke is flat on his back for the third time in as many minutes, wishing he knew how to fluently swear. 

“I thought you spent all those years learning to fight, little Jedi,” Ventress says. 

Luke heaves himself to his feet. “I did.”

“Let’s see it, then,” Ventress says, and settles into her guard once again. 

This time, he makes it a full five minutes before she catches him off-guard, her blade to his throat. 

“Quick,” she notes. “That, too, will serve you well.”

They spar for hours. Both of them are sweaty and exhausted by the end of it. Luke manages to get the best of Ventress only twice, but she only beats him another seven times. He considers those good odds, given her experience and her propensity for cheating. 

“It’s not cheating,” she tells him once, when he accuses her of such. “It’s using every available means to assure my victory. You should learn from my example, young Skywalker.”

“I’d like to,” he says, “if only so that I can learn to counter it.”

“Spoken like a Jedi,” Ventress says.

They wipe down in silence. As she escorts him back to his room so he can wash up, Luke says, “Thank you for spending time with me today.”

“I was ordered to.”

“Still. I—enjoyed myself.”

She scoffs, but the gesture is half-hearted at best. Luke hides his smile.

“Can we spar again tomorrow?”

“No. I’m leaving at dawn. The Wellspring is sending me to your sister.”

All his breath rushes out of him at once. “You’re bringing Leia back?”

She hesitates. “I didn’t say that. I am conveying a message, that’s all.”

His heart stutters in his chest. Luke swallows. “You’re… _not_ bringing Leia back.”

“Those are not my orders.” She looks at him with something close to sympathy; Luke doesn’t meet her eyes. 

At his door, she crouches down so that she’s at eye-level with him. “Is there anything you would like me to tell your sister?”

He is so overfull with words that he cannot get any of them out. He shakes his head. But Ventress waits with the patience of a python.

“Just—just tell her that I miss her,” he chokes out eventually, and Ventress nods, and rises. She waits until his door is shut behind him, and he senses her waiting there still, silent and watchful, standing guard.

Luke can’t sleep that night, either. He lies awake for one hour, then two, waiting for his thoughts to settle, for the Force to coalesce around him and allow him rest. But he can’t settle, can’t rest. He can’t stop thinking about the conclusion he’d come to earlier: that there is no real opportunity for Anakin to change if he’s locked up. That imprisoning him in the cell concretizes and arrests his progress. And he can’t help thinking of Leia, how it could be years more until he sees her, how he understands that Leia is perhaps safer on the run in space than she would be on Naboo, but that doesn’t change how much he aches to be near her again. 

A plan forms in his mind. Quietly, knowing that his mothers sleep only a room away, Luke slips from his bed and pads over to the wardrobe. He grabs three outfits at random and rolls them up, stuffing them into his satchel on top of the black cloak, his father’s lightsaber, and the leather pouch containing his lightsaber components. Then he dresses, quiet and careful, and reaches out in the Force. 

His mothers are asleep in the room just up the hall from him. So are the Aunties, in the bedroom’s antechamber. Guards roam the halls, but guards are, he thinks, easy enough to evade—especially once he gets where he’s going. 

Ventress had never mentioned where she was staying, but if he focuses enough, the Force guides him: down hallways and across corridors, always one step ahead of or behind the guards. He pauses outside her door; she’s not alone, but both beings are asleep. Luke opens the door cautiously.

Like most rooms in the residential wing of the Palace, this one opens on an antechamber, arranged much like the sitting room in which he and his mothers had taken tea yesterday. The shaft of light from the open door glints across an emptied bottle of Alderaanian whiskey, and, on the couch behind the table, a Weequay snores loudly. Luke eases the door shut, and silently makes his way across the room to what must be the bedroom; Ventress’ signature in the Force shines out as bright and as purple as her lightsabers. Perhaps this is why he doesn’t realize she’s awake until the door is open and she’s pointing one of those sabers at his throat.

“Skywalker,” she says, like a curse, and lowers her saber. “What are you doing here?”

On the couch behind them, the Weequay starts awake and tumbles off the couch. “What is it, what’s going on?” he cries blurrily.

“Go back to sleep, Hondo,” Ventress snaps, and withdraws into her bedroom, taking Luke with her. “What’s this about, then?”

“I’m coming with you,” Luke says fiercely, “and so’s my father.”

Ventress leans back at that. “Your mother,” she says, soft and mean, “would kill me.”

Luke stands straight and as tall as he can. “My father is not going to waste away in a cell when he could be helping us. Ahsoka gave you the opportunity to become better. We’re going to do the same for him.”

“And what’s in it for me?”

Luke stares at her. “It’s the right thing to do!”

“What it is,” says Ventress coldly, “is a very great boon to ask from a Dathomiri witch. We do nothing for free, young Skywalker, and neither”—she points to the bedroom door, and presumably to the snoring Weequay behind it—“does he.”

The words pour out of him from a place he does not know. “I’ll get you out of your debt to Ahsoka.”

Whatever she had expected, that wasn’t it. “Impossible.”

“I’ll do it,” he swears. 

Ventress leans down to him, dark eyes unblinking. “I will hold you to that, little Jedi. And you will come to regret it if you cross me.”

Luke swallows. “I won’t.”

She goes to the door then, opening it and raising the lights. Hondo swears and rolls off the couch again. 

“Wake up,” Ventress snaps at him, “and ready the ship. We’ll have two passengers with us.”

“So much you ask of me,” Hondo complains, but he gets up quickly enough when Ventress tosses a heavy pouch to him. After checking its contents and grinning at her toothily, he vanishes out the door. 

Ventress, when Luke looks for her next, is dressed in her dark robes, a pack slung across her back. 

“Come,” she says to him, and leads the way out of the suite.

The way to the maximum security detention level seems to take longer, but perhaps that’s just Luke’s terror at discovery stretching each moment into infinity. Ventress leads them with surety back to the stairs, and Force-flings the standing guard against the wall hard enough that something cracks. Luke winces, and lingers on the discomfort of guilt, but helps her drag the prone, but breathing, form of the guard into the stairwell. 

The descent takes ages, even moving quickly as they are; but soon enough, they’re back at the bottom of the stairs, in front of that door. “How many?” Ventress asks, and it takes Luke only a moment to say, “Five. My father and four guards.”

Ventress curses under her breath. “I’ll handle the guards,” she says grimly, drawing her sabers. “You get Skywalker. Wait until I’ve engaged them to enter.”

“Don’t hurt them,” Luke says quickly. 

“I’ll have to hurt them,” Ventress says, cold again. “But I won’t kill them.” She opens the door and is gone in an instant. 

Luke waits until he hears her sabers ignite before he opens the door again, slipping through as small a crack as he can. Anakin is awake, dressed in sleep clothes, and tugging his boots on over his pants.

“Luke,” he says with some small surprise, upon seeing him, and then shakes his head. “I should have known.”

“Yes,” Luke says, “you should have.” He runs his hand over the control panel by Anakin’s cell. “How do I open this?”

“The center button,” Anakin says; “or—do you have my lightsaber? Stab the control panel, that should do it.”

Luke grabs the saber from his satchel and ignites it into the control panel. The forcefield dissipates into nothingness. Anakin is at his side the next second, pulling his synthleather tabard over his shirt. “Give me the lightsaber,” he orders, but Luke dodges his hand.

“No,” Luke says, frowning. “We’re leaving, we have a ship to catch.”

“To do that, we need to use the lift,” Anakin says. “Give me the saber, Luke.”

Luke hands him the saber. 

Anakin moves too quickly for Luke to follow: one second, Ventress is fighting three guards, the fourth still against a wall; the next, the three are on the ground, unmoving except for the rise of their armored chests. 

Anakin turns back to him. “Come on, Luke,” he says, and, dizzy with relief, Luke goes. 

Alarms are blaring when they finally emerge from the turbolift. Ventress and Anakin bound down the halls, Luke sprinting at their heels to keep up. They Force-throw guards from their path, skid around corners, and, eventually, they reach the main hangar. A ship like a flying saucer, gangplank extended, awaits them off to one side; Ventress makes for it without hesitation but Anakin slows. 

He looks to Luke. “Hondo Ohnaka? Your escape plan is _Hondo Ohnaka?!”_

“Is that bad?” Luke cries, and keeps running; after a second, he feels Anakin resume his pace. 

“Skywalker!” Hondo calls jovially from the gangplank. “It is so good to see you again!”

“Save it,” Anakin snaps, and runs up the gangplank, and Luke is about to follow when a familiar voice screams his name.

He turns. Mom stands at the hangar entrance, her skirts flapping in the breeze from the port, her face white, even without cosmetics. 

“Luke—” Anakin calls, and stops, frozen at the sight of Mom. Luke doesn’t blame him; he feels frozen, too. 

But he steps toward her, runs toward her. He throws himself into her arms. There is no place safer in the whole of the galaxy. 

“I’m so sorry, Mom,” he says, half-shouting to be heard as the saucer’s engines ignite. “I’m sorry, but I have to do this—I have to—there’s still good in him.”

“That’s not your responsibility, Luke!” she cries. “You owe him nothing! Stay here, please!”

But Luke does owe Anakin, the way one prisoner owes another for survival during their mutual imprisonment. He would not have survived without Anakin, on the _Devastator_ or the Death Star. It’s up to him, now, to make sure Anakin survives this.

“I have to go,” he says, “I have to. I’m sorry.”

Her eyes are bright with tears, but she leans down and kisses his brow. Then she takes his hand and walks him to the gangplank, where Anakin still waits, unmoving but for the wind in his hair. 

“If any harm comes to him,” Mom shouts at Anakin, “by my ancestors I swear this: I will kill you.”

Anakin says nothing, only nods; but his eyes are unblinking on hers. She bends once again, enveloping Luke in a hug; and then she steps back. “Be safe, my son.”

Helplessly, Luke nods, and staggers up the gangplank, where Anakin catches his hand and steadies him. The last thing he sees as the gangplank closes is her face, her dark eyes, the tears streaming down her cheeks. 

Inside, Anakin leads Luke to the cockpit, straps him in carefully to one of the seats behind the pilot’s. He sees the mouth of the hangar, the spray of water from the Theed waterfalls, and then the starry night sky, as Hondo steers them into atmosphere. 

“Right,” Hondo says, somehow sounding gleeful. “Where are we going?”

“You know where we’re going,” Ventress says, “you got the same briefing I did.”

“So I did!” He begins to plug coordinates into the navcomputer. 

“Where _are_ we going?” Anakin asks.

Luke’s mouth goes dry. He still hasn’t told him. It’s Ventress who answers. 

“We’re going to see Ahsoka and the girl.”

“What girl?”

Luke swallows. He opens his mouth; the name slips sweetly out. “Leia.”

“Okay,” Anakin says. Silence falls for one beat, then two. They enter hyperspace. Luke stares at the warping blue light and prays there are no more questions. 

Anakin asks: “Who’s Leia?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> things I am Tired of typing: gangplank
> 
> other things:  
> +[Anakin never stopped being a Jedi](https://stitchingatthecircuitboard.tumblr.com/post/144748026083/okay-then-top-five-things-about-anakin)  
> +[Anakin's journey is all about choices](https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/618320141553418240/writingonesdreams-main-gffa-i-think-one-of)  
> +[balance and the Force](https://gffa.tumblr.com/post/184923208444/so-the-chosen-one-prophecy-the-interesting)  
> +somehow, I never rec'd this fic [this fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4121383) before? but it's a good one to think about what accountability might look like for Anakin


	3. three: jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’ve just dropped from hyperspace, somewhere between Ilum and Rakata Prime, when a comm hails them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> srsly, do NOT get used to this update pace, I've got papers to write and then the fall semester!!!

They’ve just dropped from hyperspace, somewhere between Ilum and Rakata Prime, when a comm hails them. Han, being Han, answers it—Jyn later discovers that he’d done his due diligence and that it was encrypted to Ahsoka’s frequency—and Chewie howls down the hall for Ahsoka to come, and quickly. 

Jyn doesn’t go; Jyn is in the medical center with Leia, watching the skin on her arm regrow a white so shiny it seems to have flame trapped inside it yet, watching Leia strive to forge her lightsaber. The unofficial policy on the _Falcon_ now is that Leia is not, under any condition, to ever be left alone. This is Jyn’s policy, after the catastrophe on Ilum, and the others have taken to it with quiet, chagrined acceptance. 

In any case: Chewie howls down the halls for Ahsoka to come, and quickly, and Ahsoka rises from her seat at the other end of Leia’s medicapsule and goes, never to keep a Wookiee waiting. She’s gone a long time, nearly an hour, and her face is—complicated, Jyn decides—when she comes back. 

Leia, sharp-eyed girl that she is, picks up on that immediately. The floating components of her saber drop gracefully to the blanket over her lap. “What happened?” she asks, before Jyn can. 

Ahsoka settles heavily into her chair. She scrubs her hands over her face. “Many, many things,” she says. 

“Care to elaborate?” Jyn asks.

Ahsoka looks at her with such utter exhaustion that Jyn almost feels bad for asking. “The first thing to know,” she says, directing her words to Leia, “is that Barriss is going to rendezvous with us at Bespin.”

“Oh, good,” Leia says, almost absent. The saber components float again to eye level. “I was wondering when she’d arrive.”

Ahsoka sharpens, leans forward. “You knew she was coming?”

“Many are coming, with things to teach me,” says Leia. “To help me complete my training.”

“Leia,” says Ahsoka, gently and exhaustedly chiding. “We’ve been over this—you need to tell us things like this so we can protect you as best we can.”

Leia has the grace to look abashed at that, but not for long. The lightsaber components rotate around an invisible axis, gradually falling into a line, one by one, power cells and energy gate, crystal and energy gate, modulation circuits and blade emitter, and around all of it, the casing they’d all helped her forge from whatever was stored in the _Falcon_ ’s smuggling compartments, the wiring they’d improvised from the ship’s repair kit. The crystal seems to glimmer brilliantly amidst the metal and wiring, shining blue, and green, and a rosy pink as it rotates gently in the air. It unsettles Jyn, and she touches her own crystal over her shirt, feeling the shape of it through the fabric. At least Lyra had had the good taste to pick an unremarkable crystal. No one could ever mistake Leia’s for something ordinary. 

Ahsoka watches Leia carefully now. “Are you ready?”

“I think so,” Leia breathes, and closes her eyes. The components of the lightsaber begin to slide neatly into the casing, one after another, until even the crystal is enveloped in metal and cannot be seen. After a long moment, the blade emitter and its matrix slide home, and Leia opens her eyes.

“Be careful where you point it,” Ahsoka warns unnecessarily; Leia seizes the saber and holds it upright. When she ignites it, it shines a base-white like Ahsoka’s sabers, but shimmers like a living rainbow. Holding it, in her white-flame arm, Leia looks unreal, like a god, like magic made flesh, if Jyn were the type to imagine such things. 

Jyn looks from the saber—too bright to stare at for long—to Ahsoka. She is smiling, proud, but there is something distant in her eyes. 

“Congratulations,” she says, and maybe Jyn is just imagining the hollow quality to her voice. “You’ve completed your first saber, Leia.”

Leia deactivates the saber, and is suddenly just a girl again, dark-eyed and dark-haired, her cheeks moon-round.

“Thank you,” she says.

Later, when Leia is sleeping, Ahsoka summons Artoo to watch over her. “I need to speak with you,” she says quietly to Jyn; Jyn, glancing at Leia sleeping, goes.

Ahsoka leads her back to the quarters the three of them share. “You may want to sit down,” she says, and while Jyn would normally bristle at such a suggestion, Ahsoka’s tone is so terribly compassionate that she finds herself sitting on Leia’s bunk before she can really think about it. 

“Barriss had…so many things to tell me,” Ahsoka says. “Things we will need to confer on, before we tell Leia. Things she won’t take well. But she told me something most relevant to you, Jyn. An agent of Davits Draven is accompanying her. Do you remember Cassian Andor?”

As if she could forget. Jyn keenly recalls his dark eyes and raptor’s nose, the satisfaction of taking him down with her baton. “Yes.”

“Barriss told me,” Ahsoka says, watching Jyn as carefully as she had watched Leia earlier, “that he will come with questions you may not be able to answer. Questions about your father.”

Shock is a nasty thing, Jyn thinks distantly. The way it slows and accelerates your heartbeat simultaneously. How it drains the blood from your face and hands and leaves you unfeeling. 

“He’d only have questions about my father if my father were alive,” she says numbly.

Ahsoka nods. “That is my thinking, too.”

Jyn drops her head in her hands. She wants to tear her hair out. She settles for twisting her fingers through it. “I had hoped—I was so sure—” She drops off. 

Ahsoka crouches down before her so as to meet her eyes; Jyn looks away. “I know,” Ahsoka says gently. “I understand. I just—wanted you to have some warning before he arrived.”

Blindly, Jyn extends one hand; Ahsoka is quick to grasp it. “Thanks, Ahsoka,” she says.

“If there’s anything I can do—”

“There’s not. But thank you.”

Ahsoka takes over from Artoo after that, and Jyn, grabbing a romance novel she hasn’t started, wanders into the cockpit, where Han and Chewie are bickering companionably.

“Why Bespin?” Jyn wonders at a break in Chewie’s indignant howling, and Han jumps in his seat. Evidently he hadn’t heard her come in. 

He settles again, smoothing his hair and facing forward. “We’ve got a friend there who can help us lay low for a while.”

Chewie lets out a dubious purr. 

“Well, what would _you_ call Lando?” Han asks.

Chewie rattles off a howling list of adjectives too quickly for Jyn to parse, but Han apparently has no such difficulty. He flushes, and mutters something indecipherable under his breath, and leans over the controls in an admirable impression of busyness. Then he stands. “I’m going to relieve Ahsoka,” he announces, and strides purposefully from the cockpit.

Chewie groans in exasperation, but takes the pilot’s seat. Jyn takes co-pilot’s. She leans toward Chewie, romance novel forgotten. “So what’s the deal with Han and this Lando character?”

Jyn has never known Chewie to be a gossip, but he’s generally a reliable source of information; he’s always done her the courtesy of answering her questions. But he visibly hesitates now.

“Is he—a smuggler? A criminal? Dangerous? Should we be worried about taking Leia there?” Jyn presses.

Hesitantly, Chewie howls: _yes, yes, no, no._

Jyn frowns. “How can he be a criminal if he’s not dangerous?”

Chewie looks pointedly at the cockpit door where Han had, just moments ago, petulantly walked away.

Jyn huffs. “Fine,” she says, and opens her book.

The journey to Bespin takes four days; they’re avoiding the Core, and that means avoiding the hyperspace lanes that would accelerate their travel. Instead, they drop in and out of hyperspace after refueling at one of the moons of Mobus, relying on the sublight engines more than the hyperdrive. Ahsoka pays for the fuel—of course she does; Han would have a fit otherwise—and they’re off again, their surroundings either star-studded black or whirling blue-white, patterned like burnt flesh. Jyn wishes she didn’t know that first hand.

Leia, after they pass Rakata Prime, is out of the medbay, her arm once again miraculously functional save for that sleeve of flame-white skin that spans the tips of her fingers to almost her shoulder. The only other mark she bears of the experiences is a small, splotchy star on her right cheek, of the same too-shiny scar tissue. If she cares about either scars, Leia gives no indication; she takes to following them all around the _Falcon_ , asking thoughtful if incessant questions, when she’s not either meditating or sparring with Ahsoka. 

The sparring sessions have become something new. They fold the dejarik table out of the way and warm up, practicing forms in slow-motion; sometimes, Jyn follows along, her baton held high instead of a lightsaber. But she knows to get out of the way when the sabers are ignited, and leans in the doorway and watches silently.

The bouts are far from silent. Every second, it seems, the lightsabers clash with a vibrant, violent hum, Leia’s saber shimmering green and blue and purple and pink, Ahsoka’s shining that stark, ascetic white. Both are a blur of motion, impossible to see clearly for more than a second. At the beginning, Jyn worries for the structural integrity of the ship—Ahsoka had mentioned that lightsabers can cut through near anything when she and Leia had first started bouting, more than two years ago now—and for Leia, being so small, and, as a human, so terribly fragile against what might just be the deadliest weapon in the galaxy. But Leia has always held her own, and the two of them are keenly careful of the ship. More than two years after boarding the _Falcon_ , there’s never been even a streak of soot left behind them, at least not that Jyn’s aware. 

Time passes quickly, is what she means by this. Jyn shadows Leia, helps Artoo with any necessary repairs, reads the dwindling pile of romance novels, watches Leia and Ahsoka spar. She cooks, when it’s her turn, necessity making her capable; she cleans when it’s her turn, too. 

Four days pass quick, when you’re busy every minute of it. 

The last leg of the journey they make in hyperspace. The Corellian Trade Spine runs from Corellia through the Anoat Sector and nearly into Wild Space; were they to limp along at sublight beside it, they’d fall prey to any number of pirates waiting for an unwary ship to drop into their midst. Han is edgy enough without having to navigate sublight speeds, anyways. The closer they get to Bespin, the grumpier he becomes. 

“It was your idea,” Jyn reminds him, watching him root around like an enraged puffer pig in one of the engine rooms for something to need fixing. She has a better idea, now, why the _Falcon_ was in such a state of disrepair when they first arrived. Han needs something to focus his energy on sometimes, and repairs are as good a thing as any. “It was your idea to go to Bespin.”

“I know that,” Han snaps. “I still think it’s the best move for us. That doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it.”

“Force forbid you be happy about it. But you could try being less—” She waves her hand at him, unable to find the words. “—less _this_ about it. You’re upsetting Leia.”

At that he spins to face her so quickly he must be dizzy. He points at her with a spanner. “If I were upsetting Leia, I would be hearing about it from Leia, then Ahsoka, _then_ you, then Chewie, and I would have figured it out and handled it when Leia told me. I would die for that kid. Don’t bluff with cards you don’t hold.”

“Isn’t that the point of bluffing?”

He turns back to the toolbox. “There is no point to bluffing,” he says, “when you’re dealing with Force-users. I’d’ve thought you’d’ve figured that out by now, Jyn.”

She scrutinizes him as he emerges with another spanner. There’s a stripe of dark grease down his hand. “What is the deal with you and this Lando character, anyway?”

“Chewie didn’t tell you?”

“He’s suddenly very cagey.”

“I knew there was a reason he’s my best friend,” Han mutters, and sighs, straightening. “Fine. The deal with Lando is he’s my ex, sort of, and I won the _Falcon_ from him in a game of sabacc, and he’s never really gotten over it. But he’s becoming respectable, now, so I’ve heard, so hopefully bygones are bygones.”

Jyn has little romantic experience to speak of—there was a flirtation with Toora’s niece on Tatooine that never went anywhere, and before that an unspoken crush upon one of Saw Gerrera’s spies on Jedha, and it’s not like there’s been opportunity, these last two-and-a-half years in space, for anything—but she somehow doubts that respectability is really the cure for a bruised heart and wounded ego. 

Bespin is huge. All planets look huge from orbit, Jyn’s traveled enough to know this, but she’s never been to a gas giant. Even Mobus, a gas giant itself, only had inhabited moons; but Bespin itself is home to living beings harvesting its precious tibanna gas. 

“Lando’s an administrator at Cloud City,” Han says, pointing. The city itself emerges from the clouds as he does so, swathes of rosy gas parting to reveal the graceful curves of the domed city and its downward facing spire. 

“Wow,” Leia breathes, staring at it. She turns to Ahsoka. “Have you been here before?”

Ahsoka shakes her head, but she, too, is transfixed by the floating city. “Never,” she says. “I don’t think the Clone Wars got this far…and the Alliance has never sent me here, either.”

“Well, ladies, you’re in for a treat,” Han says with forced cheer. “Cloud City is one of the wonders of the Galaxy, and that’s for sure.”

Chewie roars something that sounds suspiciously like a comment on Han’s experience of the wonders of the Galaxy, and Han rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling, however much he tries to hide it. 

They’re hailed as they approach and directed to a landing platform at the north end of the city; a small group of beings awaits them by the time they descend and settle onto the platform. Leia, in a habit she hasn’t displayed since she was twelve, quietly takes Jyn’s hand, resting her other hand on Artoo’s domed head. Han and Chewbacca lead the way; Ahsoka follows them. 

Jyn registers the presence of the guards first: two on each side, flanking a dark-skinned man in a powder-blue cape and a pale-skinned assistant wearing some kind of cybernetic construct around his skull. The caped man steps forward and bows graciously.

“Welcome,” he says, “to Cloud City.”

“Am I included in that welcome?” Han wonders.

The caped man looks for a moment as though he is suppressing several contradictory reactions. He eventually settles on mild exasperation. “Yes, Han,” the man who must be Lando says, “you’re included—as long as you haven’t done anything to my ship.”

“ _My_ ship,” Han corrects automatically, but Lando has already moved on, clasping hands with Chewbacca, greeting Ahsoka with every ounce of charm he possesses, and bowing to Jyn and Leia. 

“And you are?” he inquires, still charming.

“Jyn,” Jyn says shortly, unwilling to be charmed, “and Leia.”

Leia bows to Lando with every millimeter of grace she must have learned from her mothers, and says politely, “Thank you for your hospitality.”

“Why, it is my pleasure,” says Lando, and it’s not hard to see that he’s charmed in spite of himself. He turns back to Ahsoka. “A Mirialan woman—an associate of yours, I believe?—arrived with her companion late last night. We alerted her to your arrival; I imagine she’ll be waiting for you inside.”

“Thank you,” Ahsoka murmurs. “We appreciate your kindness, Baron Administrator, in allowing us to stay here.”

“But of course,” Lando says magnanimously. “All are welcome on Cloud City.”

He walks with Han as they enter the city. “I sense, my friend,” Lando says, the wind carrying his words to Jyn’s ears, “that you’ve brought trouble to my door.”

“Never,” Han swears. But he’s always been a terrible liar. 

Barriss Offee is indeed awaiting them, alone, in the suite to which Lando and his entourage lead them. She rises immediately as they enter, severe in black scarf and dress, her tattoos stark on her cheeks, her empty sleeve pinned neatly to her shoulder. Her lightsaber is clipped to her belt at her right hip. 

Ahsoka doesn’t run to her, but Jyn senses that’s only because Lando and his aide and his guards are still there, watching every move they make with a thinly veiled mix of suspicion and curiosity. Instead, Ahsoka walks calmly to Barriss and clasps her hand briefly. 

If Barriss is taken aback by the coolness of Ahsoka’s greeting, she shows nothing. She looks over Ahsoka’s shoulder and addresses Lando: “Thank you, Baron, for your hospitality.” It’s just warm enough not to offend, but the words are a dismissal, and Lando clearly interprets them as such. He bows slightly, and sweeps from their suite, his powder-blue cape whirling in the air, his aide and guards flanking him.

Only once Lando and his people are gone do they all relax. Ahsoka kisses Barriss, just chaste enough that Jyn almost doesn’t feel the need to cover Leia’s eyes, but that’s mostly because Leia is circling this main room with interest, pausing at the viewport to stare, awed, at the drifts of rose-colored cloud surrounding them. Han and Chewie simultaneously flop onto one of the couches; for lack of something better to do, Jyn follows suit. Artoo stands guard at the door. 

At last, Ahsoka draws back from Barriss, looking a little blissed, a little dizzy, so much so that Jyn aches, for a second, to know what that feels like, to have that kind of intimacy in her life. But she forces that ache down and away. She’s twenty-one, nearly twenty-two; there will, she tells herself, be time enough to discover that intimacy, once the war is over. 

“What now?” she asks, mostly to distract herself from thoughts of what she doesn’t have and won’t in the near future. 

Ahsoka and Barriss sit adjacent to the three of them. Ahsoka opens her mouth, but a set of doors from further within the suite hiss open at that instant, and Cassian Andor enters the room. 

Ahsoka sighs. “Captain Andor,” she says in quiet greeting, and Andor nods with curt respect as he takes a seat on the couch opposite Jyn, Han, and Chewie. 

Han is squinting at Andor. “Who’s this guy?”

“Captain Cassian Andor,” Barriss says, “of Alliance Intelligence.”

Han squints more. It’s a wonder he can see, at this point. “And why is he here?”

“For me,” Jyn says quietly. “He’s here for me.”

Han’s attention swings from Andor to Jyn. “Everything okay?” he asks her.

“Yes,” Jyn says, and feels braver for having said it. Andor is watching her with those dark hawk-eyes, as though he can see right through to the heart of her, and maybe he can, for all the good it’ll do him. Ahsoka’s given her some pointers, the last few years; Jyn is cannier to interrogational tricks now than she was when Dormé first unveiled her identity before Wellspring and everyone else. 

She looks to Ahsoka. “Do you need me for anything?”

“Don’t you want to rest?” Ahsoka asks gently. “There’s time.”

“There’s not,” Andor corrects. “This information, whatever there is of it, is extremely time-sensitive.”

Jyn shrugs. “There’s no time, apparently,” she says dryly to Ahsoka. “I’ll be fine.” Standing, she turns to Andor. “Let’s get this over with.”

He heads back towards the door from which he’d earlier emerged, and Jyn goes to follow, but Leia catches her hand, quick and close. She raises her other hand and touches Jyn’s breastbone, where her mother’s faith still hangs heavy around her neck. 

“The Force is with you,” Leia says seriously, and maybe it’s the kind of thing Lyra would have found comforting; but Jyn has seen at once too much and not enough of the galaxy to fully take heart at the words. 

She follows Andor. 

He leads her down a narrow corridor to a small room. There is no viewport, no natural light, only a harsh fluorescent that he activates as he enters. Ignoring her, he removes a scanner from his belt and proceeds to—she assumes—check for listening devices. At length, apparently satisfied, he gestures for her to sit on the room’s one chair.

“I’ll stand, thanks,” Jyn says, unwilling to cede any small measure of power she might hold in this exchange, and not a little contrary for its own sake. 

Andor shrugs. “As you wish,” he says mildly. “When was the last time you saw your father?”

“I’d thought this part of my history well-documented,” Jyn retorts. “Fourteen years ago, or thereabouts.”

“So not since Lah’mu.”

“Not since.”

“Any contact with him?”

“None. I like to think he’s dead.” She forces the words out, hopes they sound as dispassionate as she wants them to. 

Andor scrutinizes her, expressionless. “What about Saw Gerrera?”

She looks at him sharply. “What about Saw?”

“Have you had any contact with him since you—parted ways?”

Jyn shakes her head. “None,” she says again, and knows she does no succeed in sounding dispassionate.

Andor is still scrutinizing her when she looks back to him. “On what terms,” he says, “did you part ways?”

She hesitates. “A job went bad,” she says. “I couldn’t lead the Imps back to Saw. I had to get off-planet quickly.”

“But he vouched for you when you were exposed to the Alliance.”

“He did.” She wonders where he’s going with this.

He says, “I need you to come with me. To Jedha. To meet Saw Gerrera.”

She balks at that. “I’m appointed to Leia by Wellspring’s wife. I won’t abandon her.”

“Offee is replacing you,” Andor says, “that’s why she’s here. My orders come from the Wellspring herself. They supersede the ones you were given.”

“Why do you need me to meet with Saw? And what does my father have to do with any of this?”

Andor raises his hand, ticking off items on his fingers. “Things have—deteriorated between Gerrera and the Alliance since he vouched for you. We need a way in without getting killed. You represent that way. And as for your father, we don’t know if he’s dead now, but recent information suggests that he is responsible for the development of a…devastating weapon for the Imperials. We need to find him and find out what happened to him. We start with Saw.”

Jyn swallows. “When do we leave?”

“As soon as possible. It’s a long flight to Jedha.”

‘As soon as possible’ translates as ‘tomorrow at dawn,’ it transpires. The ship Andor and Barriss had arrived in needs refueling and some minor repairs to the hyperdrive; Andor returns to the ship to oversee them, tactfully, though Jyn is loath to give him credit for doing so. She goes back to the main room, where Leia and Artoo are playing dejarik. 

Leia looks up the second Jyn enters. Her round face creases in concern. “Are you alright?”

“Not really,” Jyn says, and stares at the board. “Who’s winning?”

Artoo whistles triumphantly, and Leia makes a face at him. “Artoo,” she says unnecessarily. 

Jyn watches them play out the game in silence. Artoo wins, of course, but not by much; Leia will beat him soon, Jyn’s sure of it, but she won’t be there to see it. A lump grows in her throat, a dry heat behind her eyes. She squeezes them shut. 

Leia touches her gently on her knee. “Are you alright?” she asks again. 

Jyn looks at her, this beloved monstrous girl-child, nearly fourteen and less a child every day, and her heart rends at itself. “Leia,” she says, and can’t believe how steady her voice is, “I’m leaving with Captain Andor tomorrow morning.”

Leia stills. She withdraws her hand; Jyn misses the faint warm weight of it instantly. 

“You’re leaving,” she repeats quietly.

“It’s—your mother’s orders,” Jyn says, desperate suddenly for an explanation that will make sense to Leia. “Apparently of highest importance. I can’t refuse.”

Leia looks closely at her. “You want to go, too,” she says. Her voice is bereft of accusation, but Jyn feels accusation keenly nonetheless, and abruptly realizes that she does want to go. She wants to know what happened to her father, and it’s a desperate, buried-deep want that she’s been steadfastly ignoring for fourteen years. 

“I’m sorry,” she whispers, and can’t look Leia in the eye. 

Leia hugs her. She’s so small, this girl, and Jyn is by no means large herself, but in her arms, Leia feels tiny, the power in her too much for her frame. “It’s alright, Jyn,” Leia says, kind to her bones. She pulls back and ducks until she can meet Jyn’s eyes. “I have Ahsoka and Han and Chewbacca and Artoo. I’ll be alright.”

“’Course you will,” Jyn says thickly. “And Barriss is staying on with you, too. You’ll be fine.”

Leia leans forward and hugs her again. They stay there, quiet and still and warm, until Jyn thinks to ask: “Where is everyone else?”

Leia hums. “Socks and Barriss are debriefing,” she says blithely, and Jyn chokes on spit. “Han and Chewie went to one of the casinos.”

“Want to go look for them?” Jyn means Han and Chewie; she has no intention of going to look for Barriss and Ahsoka.

Settling back into the couch, Leia shakes her head. “I think I’ll replay Artoo,” she says. “Ahsoka said there was something she wanted to tell me. I’d better wait for her. You can go look for them, though, if you want.”

“Will you be okay alone?”

Something strange flickers about Leia’s face at that, something uncanny and alien. Then she smiles, dimpling. “I’m never alone,” she says, and Artoo whirs smugly at Jyn. 

Cloud City is full of casinos, more than Jyn can count. She picks one at random and moves through it, searching for Chewie: where he is, Han will be, too, and Chewie is much easier to spot at a distance. 

She’s chivvied from the first casino before she gets too far into it, and the second, third, and fourth. The fifth, she gets doubly lucky: no one notices her in time to usher her out, and she finds Han and Chewie getting very drunk with a slightly more sober Lando in a booth near the back of the casino. 

“It’s a pity about Qi’ra,” Lando is saying kindly, as Jyn approaches. “I won’t lie and say it’s not what she deserved—”

“It’s not!” Han says indignantly.

“—or that I’m unhappy that that chapter of your life is finally closed—”

Han squints at him dubiously.

“—but I am sorry that it ended the way it did,” Lando concludes softly; Jyn has to strain to hear him. “For what it’s worth.”

Han looks up; Jyn, on instinct, ducks behind a waiter droid and into the booth adjacent his and Lando’s. Her heart races. She listens intently. 

“So, my friend,” Lando says. “Tell me about this trouble you’ve brought me.”

A long pause; nothing from Chewie.

At last Han says, “Trouble? There’s no trouble.” 

“You’ve always been an awful liar, Han,” Lando says, not unkindly. “At least do me the courtesy of letting me know what I’m getting myself and my city into, here.”

Chewie grumbles something that Jyn can’t quite catch and rises, leaving the booth; Jyn shrinks further back into her own as though she could hide from him; by the time she looks up, another being has slid into her booth and is watching her curiously.

It’s Andor.

“Spying on your friends?” he says quietly. 

Jyn shrugs tightly. “I’m more curious about the Baron Administrator,” she whispers, “not that it’s any of your business.”

“Of course not,” Andor agrees easily. “And what have you learned?”

“I’ll tell you, when you let me listen,” she hisses. He raises his hands peaceably, and leans back, watching their surroundings alertly. Jyn leans back, too, and listens intently.

“—no trouble,” Han is saying stubbornly, “I’m telling you. It’s a kid and her guardians. They just need a place to lay low for a few days. We all need a breath of air that hasn’t been recycled a dozen times over. That’s all.”

“And their being here won’t draw…the wrong kind of attention?”

“Why would it?” Han sounds wary now. “No one knows we’re here.”

“You count yourself among them,” Lando notes. He sounds almost fond. “You get attached too easily, Han.”

Lando mispronounces Han’s name, Jyn notices, but Han doesn’t correct him. “I do not!”

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Lando says, openly teasing. “You always have. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“It is in my line of work,” Han grumbles.

“And what is your line of work, these days? Ferrying the downtrodden?”

“You wouldn’t call them that if you knew them.”

“So tell me about them,” Lando says. “What are they like?”

A pause. “Private,” Han says shortly. “If you really want to know, Lando, I suggest you ask them yourself.”

“I may do just that,” Lando says. “So…” He draws the word out. “Shall we retire somewhere more private?”

“Let me guess,” Han says, dust-dry. “You’ve got more of your memoirs you’d like to regale me with, don’t you.”

“What can I say? I miss having an audience who appreciates me,” Lando says.

“‘Appreciate’ is one word for it,” Han mutters, and then there’s the sound of shuffling, and Han and Lando walk off. 

She looks up. Andor is still watching her curiously. There’s an odd turn to his expression that she can’t quite place, but it makes her cheeks heat, and she sets her jaw rather than look away. “What?”

“I think you’re probably wasted as that girl’s watcher,” Andor says baldly.

“I’m not,” Jyn says flatly. “Believe me, I’m not.”

He shrugs, apparently unbothered. “I did say ‘probably.’”

Irrationally, this just irritates her further. “What are you doing here, anyway?”

“Keeping an eye on you.”

“I don’t need your—your _protection_ ,” she says, nettled. 

His expression is a perfect mask. “That’s not what this is.”

Oh, he—he thought she might betray them. Somehow. Jyn seethes, and conceals it only a little better than she might’ve two years ago, when she’d snapped her teeth at him just because she could. “Trust,” she bites out, “goes both ways.” She rises from the booth as gracefully as she can, and leaves the casino. She can feel his eyes between her shoulder blades the entire way back to their suite, but he’s never there when she turns to catch him at it.

She returns to chaos. Artoo is streaking across the room, wailing in distress; the dejarik table is in several crumpled pieces around the couches, two of which are overturned. Sparks still fly from the table’s frayed wiring From one of the branching halls—not the one Andor had led her down earlier, but from the opposite side of the main room—comes the sound of shouting. Jyn makes to enter, hand going automatically for the baton at her side, when Andor is suddenly at her side, stopping her. 

“Let me go first,” he says, orders, and Jyn bites her tongue to keep from snapping at him, but he has a blaster and she doesn’t, so it makes some kind of sense. If he wants to get shot by whatever’s invaded their quarters—

But the thought sits coldly with her. She thinks of the strange turn of his expression in the casino, the heat in her cheeks; and she thinks of her father, maybe alive, whom she cannot reach without Andor’s help. Such thoughts no longer belong to her relationship with him—unless things go badly.

Andor leading the way, Jyn follows him into the room; she expects him to make for the hallway from which the shouts are coming, but he heads for Artoo instead. 

He catches Artoo and manages to get him to stop racing across the room. “What happened?” Andor whispers urgently.

Artoo whistles so rapidly Jyn has trouble keeping up, thought she manages to get the gist: Leia did this. Ahsoka told her something—here, Jyn’s binary fails her—and Leia reacted like this. And that something had distressed Artoo into near-incoherence and panic. 

Andor holsters his blaster, his face expressionless; Jyn, reluctantly, puts her baton back on her belt. 

“Do you know what this is about?” she asks as they head for the shouting.

“Yes,” Andor says, and nothing else.

“Are you going to tell me?”

He frowns at her thoughtfully. She takes a breath. “Trust,” she begins—

“—goes both ways. I remember.” He exhales sharply through his nose. “Anakin Skywalker has defected from the Empire and escaped Alliance custody. He’s on the run with Luke Naberrie and Asajj Ventress. We don’t know what he’s planning or where he’s going, but we suspect he’ll try to make contact with Leia.”

Jyn sits down abruptly. “I can’t leave,” she says numbly. 

Andor crouches before her, eyes sharp on hers. “You can and you will,” he says. “Leia will be safer without you and with Offee than the other way around. Why did you think Wellspring sent another Jedi to her daughter? It’s in case Skywalker finds them.”

She looks away. “Why do you call him ‘Skywalker’? Why not ‘Vader’?”

His gaze never wavers; she can feel it like a brand. “It’s how the Wellspring speaks of him.” He shifts on his heels to sit on the couch beside her. “Jyn,” he says. She raises her eyes to his at last. “This changes nothing.”

“How can you say that?” Even Artoo lets out a screech of indignation at the words, and Jyn rises, unable to sit still. “Leia has had a stable group of beings around her for the last two years, and now it’s being disrupted at the very moment she learns that her brother is once again in the clutches of the man many Rebels would consider their worst enemy! Of course it changes things! Of course she’s having trouble with it!”

Andor stays seated while she paces the space in front of him. “What I meant,” he says, calm strained with the bite of impatience, “is that it changes nothing for you. Your duty remains as it was before Leia heard this news. Your duty to the Wellspring and the Alliance, and to the orders they give, remains as it was. The mood of one girl does not supersede the wellbeing of the Galaxy.”

“You don’t know Leia,” Jyn snaps, and she knows he’s right, she knows it, knows it’s the same kind of calculus her mother had made when she’d put that crystal round Jyn’s neck and run back to kill Krennic, that if she can’t really blame her mother for making that calculation, then she can’t blame Andor, either. But that doesn’t make it easier, or better.

She goes to find Leia. 

Jyn finds Ahsoka and Barriss first, huddled at a door along the corridor. “Leia,” Ahsoka is saying, “please open the door—please talk to us—”

But from within there is nothing but the sound of weeping. Jyn shoulders her way past Barriss, past Ahsoka. “Leia,” she calls softly, “it’s Jyn. Can I come in?”

At first she thinks Leia hasn’t heard; but the weeping stutters, and the door opens a crack. Jyn pushes it open further and slips inside, closing the door behind her. 

Inside, the room is even more chaotic than the main room of the suite had been: the bed is overturned, a pillow burst, blankets strewn across the floor; the travel case with Leia’s clothes is broken open, and the clothes litter the room like blood in many colors. It takes her a second to find Leia, but Jyn locates her huddled in the closet, knees hugged to chest, crying still. 

Jyn settles cross-legged next to her. “Leia,” she says softly, “what’s going on?”

“Did you know?” Leia asks, not looking up. Her voice is muffled by her knees. 

“Not until Artoo told me,” Jyn says. “I only know what he told me, and something tells me that that wasn’t the whole story.”

Leia looks up, pale, eyes red-rimmed, cheeks wet. “It was Luke,” she says. “Luke broke— _him_ —out of Alliance custody on Naboo and ran off with him. He could’ve—he could’ve stayed there, and I could’ve gone _home_ , and we could’ve seen each other again, and we could’ve been together again—but Luke chose him over me. Over our mothers. Over _me_.” She’s overcome again, and buries her face in her knees to stifle a wail of grief. The room’s contents rattle and shift around them as though a strong wind circles the room, and then they lie still again. 

Jyn hesitates. “May I touch you, Leia?”

Leia shuffles to the side, making room; Jyn settles in next to her. Their hips and shoulders jostle each other, and Jyn leans her head against the closet wall. She mulls over what Leia has told her. At last, she says, “What does this tell you, Leia?”

But it’s the wrong move. That invisible wind whips around the room again. “I don’t want that,” Leia cries, “I don’t want this to be—to be a lesson, _I’m so sick of lessons_ , I just want to—to feel! Why aren’t I allowed to feel?”

“Of course you’re allowed to feel,” Jyn says fiercely. “Of course you are. I never meant to suggest otherwise. Feel whatever you need to feel, Leia. But don’t let feeling blind you. That’s all I meant.”

“I don’t _want_ to forgive him,” Leia says. “Not Luke— _him_. He doesn’t deserve it.”

“No one is saying you have to forgive him,” Jyn says intently.

Leia looks at her, dark eyes drowned in tears. “Luke is,” she says. 

She doesn’t know what to say to that. Eventually, Jyn says, quiet, “You don’t have to always agree with him just because he’s your brother.”

“But what _happened_ to him,” Leia says plaintively, “that makes him think like this? What did he do to him?”

“I don’t know,” Jyn says, as gently as she knows how. “Maybe something terrible. Maybe nothing. We have no way of knowing.”

“I don’t know which one is worse,” Leia says miserably. “Ahsoka—Ahsoka said that Mom said he seemed normal. But I don’t understand why he would do what he did if he was the same.”

“‘Normal’ and ‘same’ are two very different metrics. It would be extraordinary, Leia, if Luke survived what he did unchanged. You mustn’t expect that of him.”

Leia hunches further over her knees. “I’m so afraid of what he might be like now,” she whispers. The fear is livid on her face like a bruise. 

“I know,” Jyn says quietly. “I wish I could make this better for you, Leia. But I can’t.”

They sit in silence for a long while, until their breaths sync and their heart rates slow. Jyn could almost fall asleep, they sit there for so long. Her eyes drift shut. 

“Remember who the enemy is,” Leia murmurs. Jyn opens her eyes. “Something I heard, somewhere. I don’t know who from. But I know this: my brother will never be my enemy. I’ll keep faith with him.”

“You think you’ll see him again?” Jyn asks before she can think better of it. But the wind does not arise. Leia’s eyes blaze in the dark.

“I know I will,” she says. 

They all come to see her off the next morning, when the sky is still dark and starry beyond the feathery clouds enclosing the City. Andor tactfully goes to wait inside the ship to give them all time to part. 

Ahsoka hugs her, lekku pressing gently into Jyn’s cheek, and, with steady voice and kind eyes, says, “Thank you for your service, Jyn Erso. No one could have done better. Good luck as you go forward. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

“Thank you,” Jyn murmurs, and blinks back tears. 

Barriss clasps her hand and thanks her for taking such good care of Leia; Artoo whistles sadly at her, but promises to keep the _Falcon_ up to code in her honor, which causes Han to squawk indignantly before giving her a hug and telling her to take care of herself. Chewie roars that he’ll look after everyone for her, and extracts from her the promise that she’ll look after herself as well as she can, before giving her a very warm, very furry hug. 

And then Leia steps forward. She looks tired, still, after the exhaustion of yesterday and what must have been a restless night’s sleep, but her eyes are alert, and her mouth smiles tremulously in the dawn’s half-light. 

Jyn opens her arms, and Leia steps into them unhesitatingly. They stand like that for a long moment before Leia withdraws, still smiling slightly, the tremulousness gone and replaced by a royal kind of stoicism. 

“Jyn,” Leia says softly; Jyn has to bend down to hear her properly. Leia swallows. “You’ve been as a sister to me. I’m so glad to know you.”

“And I you,” Jyn says, the words insufficient to convey the depth of her feeling. 

“We will meet again,” Leia says. “And the Force will be with you, always.”

“Thank you, Leia,” Jyn whispers. She gives Leia one last hug, nods tightly to Ahsoka and Barriss and Han and Chewie and Artoo, and makes up the boarding ramp. Her mother’s kyber crystal thuds against her sternum in time to her footsteps, and Jyn exhales, slow, as the ramp closes up behind her.

It’s time to find her father.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> dedicated to may, for putting up with and encouraging my nonsense.


	4. four: luke

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They've been in hyperspace a whole day, and Anakin isn't speaking to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with thanks to may for the look-over!

They’ve been in hyperspace a whole day, and Anakin isn’t speaking to him.

Luke doesn’t know what he expected: rage, grief, or inscrutable silence all had their equal chance, when the inciting incident was the revelation that Anakin had not one, but two children—and his entire family had conspired to keep Leia from him.

Even Luke had done so. That, Luke suspects, is unforgivable, has broken some stone-set trust between them. But he doesn’t know what else he could have done. 

So he waits, curled into a corner of the cockpit, Hondo Ohnaka at the pilot’s seat with his feet resting on the dashboard, Ventress watchful at the door, and Anakin—elsewhere, alone, a curt and golden-eyed _don’t follow me_ ensuring it. 

And Luke—Luke is angry, and afraid, and he hears Yoda’s warning mantra echoing in his very veins, and hates that he hears it. Hates himself for feeling like this. Hates Anakin, a little, barely at all, but enough, for making him feel this way. Because Luke _did nothing wrong_. He knows this, unshakably. He was right to keep Leia secret from their father all these years. He was right to free Anakin from Alliance custody. And he was right to warn Anakin, however narrow the warning had been, that a daughter existed alongside the son. 

_Leia_ ; he had said her name, and Anakin had asked the inevitable question, and: _my sister_ , Luke had said, _my twin sister_. And Anakin had sat in silence for a long, tense moment, while Ventress’ hands went slyly to her sabers, and then he’d risen abruptly and made for the door. _Don’t follow me_ , he’d said, yellow in his eyes when Luke had stood to do just that, and the words stung like a blow, and Luke had stayed, standing, watching his father walk away from him. 

“We can always throw him out the airlock,” Ventress says at last, “if you change your mind about keeping him.”

“Now there’s an idea,” Hondo exclaims.

“We are _not_ killing my father,” Luke says sharply. 

Ventress looks like she badly wants to argue the point, but says nothing in reply.

Long minutes pass. Hondo, pretending to be absorbed in his datapad, sneaks glances at them, and at Luke’s satchel, tucked under his seat, that are not sneaky enough to go unnoticed. At the third glance, Ventress rolls her eyes and stands. 

“Come, little Jedi,” she says, extending her hand to Luke. “Let us go meditate.” She levels a considering look at Hondo and adds, “Bring your satchel.”

“You are no fun, Asajj,” Hondo complains, but he settles more deeply into his seat, and continues to peruse his datapad—more genuinely this time, Luke thinks, and follows Ventress from the cockpit. 

She leads him down one of the arcing corridors to a room equipped only with a bedroll and Ventress’ pack: hers, he realizes, and hesitates in the door.

“Come in,” she says, impatience sharpening her words, and Luke enters, and sits across from her where she sits, cross-legged and straight-shouldered. She looks at him for a long moment. “Show me your saber,” she says. 

Luke opens his satchel and fetches out the leather pouch and its components, its gleaming green crystal. He lays them all out for her: stabilizing ring and power cell, modulation circuits and energy gate, blade emitter and its matrix, and that crystal in the midst of them.

She plucks the stabilizing ring from the floor and examines it. Doubtfully, she says, “You forged this?” And at his look: “Kenobi told me. It’s fine work—so fine, I might not believe it, except that Kenobi does not lie.”

“My father helped me,” Luke says.

Ventress eyes him curiously. “What do you call him? When you’re not calling him your father. Vader or Skywalker?”

“Anakin,” Luke says. “I think of him as Anakin. It’s his name.”

“So is Vader.”

“That is the name our enemy gave to him,” Luke says sharply.

“And ‘Anakin’ is the name his mother gave him,” Ventress retorts. “We none of us name ourselves. We all wear the names another gave us, and we must wear all those names others gave us. He is not Skywalker, he is not Vader: he is both, little Jedi. You delude yourself, to your peril, if you do not see it.”

“He is my _father_ ,” Luke says.

“And he is that, too.” Ventress leans forward, watches him unblinkingly. “He is your father, and he is a man named Anakin, and he is the man who led the Purges and slaughtered children. He is all of those things, little Jedi. Do not forget it.”

“I can’t.” Luke looks down at the components of his lightsaber, at that glittering emerald crystal. “I know what he is, what he’s done. But I know there’s good inside him, too. I know that he can be better. Isn’t that what’s important?”

“It’s what is important to _you_ ,” Ventress says, and gestures to the lightsaber, forestalling any possibility of reply, if Luke could only think of one. “So: You have the components and the crystal and the Force with you. What is stopping you from forging your lightsaber?”

Luke opens his mouth, answerless, and closes it again. He thinks of Obi-Wan, in the half-darkness of the room he’d stayed in on Naboo, so gently asking _what are you afraid of?_ And he thinks of the answer Ventress was unable to give, of how to navigate between Light and Dark; and he thinks of his father’s gold-glinting eyes and _don’t follow me_. A frisson of nerves straightens his spine. He thinks of blue lightning spasming over his father’s knuckles, and hurled from the Emperor’s wrath, and caught, white-gold, in his own hands. He draws up his knees to his chest and buries his face in them.

“It’s a weapon,” he says, muffled. “The only thing a weapon can do is hurt.”

Ventress is silent for a while. “That is not all a lightsaber is,” she says to him eventually. “A lightsaber is a weapon, yes, but it is a shield, too. Do you know the most common usage of a lightsaber during the Clone Wars, Luke?”

Caught as though in a snare by his name, Luke looks up. There is something akin to kindness in Ventress’ dark eyes. 

“To deflect blaster bolts,” she says, “away from one’s troops and oneself. A lightsaber, used wisely, is a device of protection. And as long as you are protecting what is right and what is good, you have nothing to fear from the saber you wield.”

Luke opens his mouth, not knowing what he intends to say until the words themselves pour forth: “He thought he was protecting what was good and right,” he whispers.

“What, the Empire?”

Luke shakes his head. “My mother.”

Ventress cants her head to the side. The light from the cabin gleams on her skull. “Did he really?” she asks slowly.

Luke has no answer for that, and a thousand. He says nothing, and looks away. 

Ventress lets it go. “Would you like to try assembling your saber?”

He shakes his head again. “No. Thank you.”

“Then perhaps meditation will help you find the answers that you seek,” she says, and he lowers his knees and crosses his ankles again, and closes his eyes, and reaches for the Force.

It opens for him at the brush of his reaching fingers, dark and starry as the night sky. And before him, directly before him, is the razed ruins of the oasis he had once shared with Leia; and in the midst of those ruins is a great, towering, silvery creature, thousands of meters long, with thousands of limbs. It raises its head to look at him, and as it does so, it reveals a figure curled beneath its looming length: Leia.

All air escapes him; he cannot breathe. “Leia,” Luke whispers. She is taller than when he saw her last, and thinner, with a silvery star high on the cheek turned toward him; her hair is braided in two loops at the crown of her head, and she’s robed in crimson and a pearlescent cream that pools around her like the discarded scales of the dragon—and it must be a dragon; Luke can conceive no other word for it—beneath whom she shelters. 

The dragon exhales a gust of air that nearly blows Luke over; he clings to a ravaged remnant of the oasis and barely manages to keep standing. When he can look up again, the dragon has laid its head back down, and Leia is standing amidst its coils, her head high, her look—cold. 

Fear curls like a sharpened hook in his chest. “Leia,” he whispers again, but she says nothing, does not move; and as he dares a step forward, and another, she still says nothing, still stands unmoving. Luke stops, and stares, hesitant to continue, terrified of what awaits him. 

Then it comes: Leia cries _**HOW COULD YOU**_ across the starry dark, and the dragon lifts its head again, until Leia is concealed; in a blur of motion, the dragon rises and spirals into the oblivion of eternal black. And Leia is gone. 

Only her words remain, echoing around him: _how could you how could you how could you—_

—and as he listens, the words blur together, indistinguishable, rising sharply into a laugh he would recognize anywhere. He first heard it in his father’s nightmares, and then in that flight control room on the Death Star, and since in his own nightmares. 

It’s the Emperor’s laugh. Luke screams.

He jolts from his trance and topples, bruising his elbow on the hard steel floor. Ventress’ arm shoots out to catch him before he can bruise much more. He shakes in her grasp, and once he’s regained his balance, she lets him go.

“She’s angry with me,” Luke says, shocked numb to the core of him. “She’s—she’s _furious_.”

“Your sister?”

He nods, speechless. 

“Well, that’s to be expected,” Ventress says unsympathetically. At his look, she continues, examining her nails as she speaks. “Consider her point of view, little Jedi: you were home and you were safe, and you had made possible her return and reunion with you and your mothers. And then you unmade that possibility. Of course she’s furious with you. Did you think the last years have been easy for her?”

“Easier than for me,” Luke snaps, and wishes the words unsaid the second he’s finished saying them. It’s not a competition, it’s not—but she had Socks, kind, trustworthy, reliable Ahsoka, and all he had was a mercurial stranger for a father, whose dark moods threatened very real danger. And he doesn’t blame her, he doesn’t; he would do it all over again if he had to, though it might drive him truly mad, but he would make that sacrifice every time it is asked of him, for her sake, to spare her anything he’s suffered, and he has suffered; he is scarred over with it countless ways. He is not as he used to be. He cannot be. 

“Of course she’s had it easier,” Ventress is saying, as though bored by the very topic, and perhaps she is. “But that doesn’t mean it’s been easy.” She regards him with something that might be disappointment, and it stings, that regard. “I would have thought you’d understand that. Being her brother and all.”

Luke is exhausted, suddenly, of being. He rises. That laugh echoes in his ears. “I have to find my father,” he says, dull. 

He can feel Ventress’ eyes on him as he leaves. 

It’s not hard to find Anakin. Contained as his Force-presence is, Luke knows his father enough by now to know where he’ll be: the engine room. 

Anakin stands with his back to the door, the fall of his cloak making him a great, hulking figure in the room’s half-light, fluorescents only partly turned on. He doesn’t turn when Luke slides open the door except for the half-turn of his head, only enough to see that it’s Luke who enters. He turns back to whatever’s in his hands wordlessly. 

Wordless too, Luke approaches him, stands at his side. He has to stand on his tiptoes to see what Anakin is working on. It’s a mouse droid, or something like it, that’s clearly been dissembled and cleaned and newly reassembled except for its casing, which Anakin holds in his hands. It rests there for a long moment, before Anakin finally fits it back onto the droid. 

“I like fixing things,” Anakin says at last. He doesn’t look at Luke, just stares, pensive, at the mouse droid. With a touch, he reactivates it, and sets it on the ground. It zooms around the room and then out the still-slid-open door, chirping happily as it goes. And then Luke and Anakin are alone. 

“I’m good at fixing things,” Anakin says quietly, as though to himself. He looks at Luke. “I don’t know how to fix this.”

“Fix what?” Luke asks, even though he thinks he knows the answer already.

“Our family,” Anakin says, and Luke swallows. “Your mother’s moved on. I didn’t know about you until Cyphar. And—and I have a daughter who has been kept from me. Who will hate me.”

“You’re lucky it was me you found at Cyphar and not her,” Luke says.

A half-smile ticks Anakin’s mouth. “She would have fought,” he says, a guess.

“She would have tried to kill you,” Luke says baldly, and shudders.

“Would I have known her for my daughter?” Anakin asks.

Luke hesitates. “If you were looking, you might’ve,” he says. “She looks so much like Mom, and like you. Not how I do. But I don’t know if you were looking.”

Silence stretches on for long minutes. 

“I wasn’t,” Anakin murmurs. “I thought you were both dead. I never even considered that there could be two of you.” 

The implication of his words, yet unspoken, hangs in the air like an executioner’s blade: _I wasn’t looking for her. I never considered she could exist. She would have fought._

_I would have killed her._

“Did you ever think about us?” Luke wonders. “About what could have been?”

Anakin shudders. “I never stopped,” he says lowly. 

“You never stopped thinking about us,” Luke says, “and you would have looked at her and seen a mirror. You would have looked at her and seen Mom. You would have seen the daughter you thought you would have. You would not have killed her, any more than you killed me.”

“It was different with you,” Anakin says. “You didn’t fight.”

“But you knew me the moment I came forward,” Luke says. Anakin had never ordered a paternity test, had never even asked for one. He had known Luke was his son on an elemental level. He had never questioned it.

Anakin is silent, and dark, his blue eyes slanted down towards the empty tabletop the mouse droid had occupied only minutes before. 

“You would have known her,” Luke says, with growing confidence. “Just like you will know her when you see her. Like you knew me.” He cannot conceive an alternative.

“And she will know me,” Anakin says. “But she will know a poisoned image of me only. She will fight me.” An abyss looms beyond his words, as great and as cold and as voiding as a black hole.

Luke says nothing, gaze torn between his father’s hands, clearing up the detritus of his droid repairs, and his father’s eyes, still that Tatooine blue. What can he say? There is nothing to say, nothing that will make a difference. 

“She is the girl with the stars on her cheeks,” Anakin says, a half-question. Luke nods. “Leia. That’s a Tatooine name.”

_Dragon_ , Luke thinks, and thinks of the towering silver creature curled around his sister’s form, and shivers. Leia will be—stranger, when he sees her next, just as he will be stranger when she sees him, than when they saw each other last. 

“Is she as fierce as her name suggests?” There’s a wry twist to Anakin’s mouth as he asks this, as though he is telling a joke. 

But it’s not funny. “Fiercer,” Luke says, and repeats: “You are lucky it was me you found at Cyphar and not her.”

Anakin slits his eyes at Luke curiously, but says nothing for a long moment as he finishes clearing off the tabletop and restoring the engine room to its former state—which isn’t exactly pristine. Then: “Why didn’t you tell me about her, Luke?”

Luke’s breath catches in his chest. He can’t find the words. He looks away.

“You had the opportunity,” Anakin prods. “The girl with stars on her cheeks. I asked you about her.”

_Asked_ is one word for what Anakin had done in an effort to get that information. Luke swallows. He can’t say this. He must. He thinks of Ventress on the other side of the ship and wishes she were closer. “I didn’t want you to know about her,” he says. 

The air in the engine room grows sharp, static, as though in the moments before a lightning strike. Too calm, Anakin says, “Why not?”

“You did what you thought was best for me,” Luke says. “I know that. But it was—” He can’t find the words. Can’t articulate it. Can’t conceive of a way to tell this to Anakin without Anakin taking it badly. 

“Go on,” Anakin says.

He can’t say it. “I survived,” he says quietly. “I don’t know what Leia would have done.”

A pause. 

“Was it so awful?” Anakin asks, with forced lightness. “Being with me?”

Abruptly Luke feels flayed, frayed to nothingness, all of him worn through. “It’s not you,” he says, and goes to the door. “It’s what you’ve done.”

“Luke,” Anakin says, sharp, defensive, but Luke doesn’t turn to look at him, just raises a hand to stop him speaking. 

“Don’t follow me,” Luke says, and leaves.

He goes back to the cabin Ventress had shown him earlier, when they’d cleared atmosphere and jumped to hyperspace. It’s full of boxes and rank with what Luke strongly suspects is the residual stench of puffer pigs, but it’s tidy enough for him, and there’s enough space to lay out a bedroll and lay flat on his back. He drops his satchel near the head of the space, spreads out the bedroll, and curls up on it, staring blindly at the aurebesh markings scrawled on the nearest box. 

He doesn’t know how to do this. He turns over to stare at the wall, putting the satchel and its unfinished saber to his back. He doesn’t know how to do any of this: how to finish his saber, how to make Anakin understand that he was wrong, how to make Leia forgive him and their father, too; how to survive what’s coming. _something terrible_ , little Ani’s voice whispers in Luke’s memory, and he hears that awful cackling laugh again, and shudders. 

Force, but he’s useless. Useless, and afraid, and angry, and _the path to the dark side_ , Yoda says, but Luke won’t go to the Dark, would rather die; he’s seen what it did to the Galaxy, and he won’t be the cause of such suffering again. 

But Ventress uses the Dark Side, her eyes clear and hooded in her face. Luke holds these truths in his hands: the Dark exhibited by the Emperor, by Anakin, too, and the Dark Ventress claims to use. He can’t fit them together, can’t reconcile them. 

He can’t seem to reconcile anything, these days. 

He dozes fitfully. Dreams haze through him like wisps of fog on the wind: Leia, cold and star-marked, that great dragon around her; Mom, tear-streaked and blinding with it, _if any harm comes to him, by my ancestors I swear this: I will kill you_ ; Anakin, blue-eyed and burning, yellow-eyed and crackling with awful energy that jumps into Luke’s open hand and rests there, shifting blue-white-gold then resolving into a sharp shard of emerald crystal that pricks his skin even as it rests in his palm. A lightsaber, vibrant green, clashing with another, and that terrible cackling laugh echoing louder and louder and louder as a wave of fire rises over white beaches—

He wakes up. Someone is knocking at his door. It can only be Anakin. 

“You missed dinner,” Anakin says when the door opens, darting a furtive glance at Luke. “I brought you something to eat.”

Luke accepts the covered tray and stands aside. There’s barely enough room for them both; Luke kicks his bedroll into something resembling a folded square and sits there. Anakin leans against a stack of boxes, studying the aurebesh customs stamps (undoubtedly forged) with more interest than is anywhere near convincing. 

He waits until Luke has finished eating (rice and legumes spiced heavily enough to set his mouth aflame, mixed with wilted greens, accompanied by a glass of blue bantha milk) before speaking.

“What exactly,” he says, “do you hope to accomplish with me, Luke?”

Luke starts, looks up, eyes traitorously wide. He could not broadcast his surprise more clearly if he tried; he flushes, and looks down again. 

“I’m just wondering,” Anakin says carefully, “if you have a plan.” _if you know what you’re doing_ , he doesn’t say. 

Luke sets the tray on the ground with deliberate care. He’s shaking slightly, he realizes. More than slightly. He’s—he’s furious.

He stands up; there’s no room to move off the bedroll, which will be badly crumpled by the time he unfurls it again. His hands clench into fists of their own accord. He can’t think of the right words, but words spew forth anyway, heedless of care. 

“You are not a—a pawn in some scheme,” Luke spits. The very idea repulses him. “I didn’t break you out from the Palace because I had some, some agenda. I broke you out for the same reason I asked you to come with me back to Naboo. Because you’re my father.” He can’t look at Anakin, is too angry to try; can’t see how he’s taking this. Does it even matter? It needs saying. “On the Death Star,” he says, “I told you that you’re a person, and your name is Anakin. I gave you back responsibility for yourself. Now you have to take it.”

Anakin leaves after that, silent as a storm cloud, and Luke crumples, all the strings of his fury cut. He shoves the dinner tray, the glass with its blue film of milk, up against the door, and tugs the bedroll out straight with harsh jerks of his hands in time to the deep, hitching breathes he can’t calm. That done, he crawls into the corner where the rumpled pillow sags and sits, knees drawn to his chest, and sobs. Leia is furious with him, and Anakin—who knows what Anakin is thinking, or feeling; that storminess threw up enough static to obfuscate any insight—and he _left his mothers_ , he _chose_ to leave them; he has no one but himself to blame.

He has no one but himself to blame. 

All at once, he calms, tears drying, breath evening out. He looks at the door, the tray shoved uncaringly against it, and sees past it, back to that moment when he had decided, in the dark of the room his mothers had given him, to leave them, to save his father, to find his sister. _I gave you back responsibility for yourself_ , he’d told Anakin, not a half hour ago, that thing Anakin had abdicated or been denied for too many years to count. Where is Luke’s responsibility? Who holds it in their hands?

Only himself. 

He made a choice, a series of choices, and he will live with them and their consequences. He may not be able to foresee those consequences, but he will live with them, own them, make them his. They will hold no power over him. They will make him no one’s slave. Leia may be angry with him, Anakin and his mothers too, but Luke did what he thought to be right. And he will keep doing that, until it is an impossibility. It’s what he does. It’s all he knows how to do.

Luke tugs his satchel to him, fishes out the leather pouch and empties it on the bedroll before him: all the lightsaber components and that glittering green crystal clattering quietly together as they fall to the fabric. Hands trembling, he lays them out in order: power cell, stabilizing ring, energy gate, activator, crystal, modulation circuits, blade emitter; and around it all, the casing he had forged under his father’s watchful gaze. Then he closes his eyes, and reaches for the Force.

It comes easily to him now, gathering around him like clouds in atmosphere and as gentle, infusing his hands, his sight. In his mind’s eye, he sees each component rise and rotate slowly before him, the Death Star’s crystal in the center; and then each component slots together, one after another, until even that terrible green crystal is hidden; but Luke can still see it, glittering, in the dark of his mind. 

He reaches out to it, lays a hand upon it, and then he is the crystal. He sees impenetrable darkness, then widening light, a hundred hands reaching to lift him up, a millennium of worshippers knelt at his altar, while cities spring to life around him in the cold red desert. He hears entreaties and appeals, curses and disbelief; gives himself away in fragments to those who need him most, stands tall and unyielding to those who dismiss him. And then—prized out from his temple, stolen across the stars, far from the cold red desert, into a different kind of cold altogether, one which reaps only death. Cold, and death, and screams, incessant screaming: this is all he knows, and he knows it for such a blink of time, but how that blink stretches into eons when there is nothing but cold and death and screaming. And then, finally, an end: a great rush of heat, a splintering apart; and he finds himself here, held close and at arm’s length, made anew, encased not in a trap, but as a shield.

“A shield,” Luke whispers, and thinks of Ventress: _as long as you are protecting what is right and what is good, you have nothing to fear from the saber you wield._

He opens his eyes. The saber, floating in the air before him, drops gracefully to fit in the palm of his hand. He raises it before him, pointed to the ceiling, and ignites it. It burns before him, all green fire, and sings as it does so, a haunting, lifting melody that winds unrepeating around him. 

“A shield,” he says again. Between Anakin and the galaxy, between Leia and Anakin, between the Emperor and all that he wishes to destroy. “That is what we will be.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this might be the last one for a while, folks--grad school is restarting and it's going to be a Lot! hopefully you'll see me before the holidays.


	5. five: jyn

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's a long flight to Jedha.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AAAAAAAAND WE'RE BACK
> 
> ETA 10 Jan 2021: as I'm an idiot and forgot to do this when posting, here's a quick timeline disclaimer now. I'm accelerating/collapsing the Death Star/Rogue One plot. Luke and Leia are almost 14. You didn't miss a huge time skip. and now: the next chapter! I hope you enjoy.

It’s a long flight to Jedha, in cramped quarters, with dubiously tolerable company. Andor’s ship has only a tiny hangar behind the cockpit that could hold perhaps ten people standing, and far fewer sitting or lying down. There’s a bench at one end of it; Jyn claims that, and watches Andor and his copilot warily. 

Andor’s copilot is a former-Imperial droid, apparently—if she trusts Andor’s account—thoroughly reprogrammed. K2S0, whom Andor calls Kay, has yet to provide any evidence to the contrary. He is ornery and suspicious and obviously, terribly, protective of Andor. That he has personality is its own defense: Jyn’s run into Imperial droids of the same make as Kay before, on Jedha, and knows well the indifferent, impersonal stares that characterize their regard. 

She didn’t expect to feel so immediately and deeply bereft, though, sitting alone on the bench, her baton an only somewhat comforting weight at her hip. Andor and Kay speak quietly to each other at the front of the ship—there’s no door sealing off the cockpit that Jyn can see—and she, by now well accustomed to company wherever she goes, be it Leia or Han or Ahsoka, Chewie or Artoo, is alone. No one to look after, no one to talk to. No awful romance novels to read. She wishes she’d stolen one from the _Falcon_ ’s library. She wishes she were still back on board the _Falcon_ , watching Leia and Ahsoka practice lightsaber forms at speed, or bothering Han or asking Chewie questions or doing repairs with Artoo. Instead, she’s here, alone in all but name, sailing across the stars to the father she’d abandoned, and the father who’d abandoned her. 

Dread knots up in her stomach, her throat, at the thought of seeing Saw again, at the very idea of seeing her father again. What will Saw say, what can Galen say? She imagines disappointment in Saw’s shrewd eyes, recriminations that remain unuttered. She can’t imagine Galen’s face, can barely remember the broad shape of it, though she thinks she’d recognize it instantly should she see it again. 

Enough. Jyn shakes her head, emptying it of thoughts of fathers. There are more immediate concerns. She rises, and begins to snoop around the ship. 

But Kay’s head twists around as she moves, and he says, snippily condescending, “Stop that.”

Jyn ignores him, and prizes off the lid of the first in a stack of long, rectangular crates opposite the boarding port. Weapons, as she’d guessed, blasters; and though the length of the crate should have been clue enough, she’s surprised, if only a little, to see a sniper’s rifle nestled into the foam packing. 

“Stop that,” Kay says again, more insistent, more irritable, and now Andor, too, is looking over his shoulder at her, his face carefully blank as he sees what she’s been looking at. Jyn meets his gaze, speculative and not hiding it, stonily defiant. A long moment passes through the gaze they hold together. At last Andor turns frontward again.

“It’s fine, Kay,” he says, and glances over his shoulder once more. “Trust goes both ways.”

Kay does not protest, but he stares a moment longer at Jyn with those unflickering white photoreceptors. She stares back. After so long with Artoo, she’s not surprised by droids with their own personality, their own agency. But it unsettles her to be regarded so hostilely by a droid. Artoo, if he had ever distrusted her, had hidden it marvelously well—and she had never considered him one to keep his opinions to himself. But then again, he must have, right? How else could he survive decades without being wiped unless he traded in secrets too dangerous to forget? 

Kay is younger than Artoo, Jyn realizes. Younger, and not quite as canny, and desperately devoted to the person who treats him like a person. There is nothing he won’t do for Andor. So long as Jyn can persuade him that she means no harm to Andor—and persuade him she must—they’ll get along just fine.

So she repacks the arsenal with care, and stretches out on the bench, her fingers wrapped loosely around the hilt of her baton. She does not close her eyes, and thinks, instead, of how to get in touch with Saw once they touch down on Jedha, how to survive doing so long enough to talk to him. Relations have soured, Andor had said, and Jyn thinks: _lot of good I’ll do them, if I can’t find a way to justify whatever trust Saw has left in me._

Kay keeps watch at the flight controls at night, and Andor opens a compartment to retrieve two bedrolls, tossing the first to Jyn once he’s caught her eye. He lays his out near the cockpit and Kay, and she unrolls hers by the bench. 

Andor sleeps on his back, she notices, as though ready to spring to action with only a second’s warning; and he falls asleep nearly as soon as he’s closed his eyes, or else he’s giving an award-worthy performance of somnolence. But Jyn’s accustomed to Leia, pretending to sleep to overhear, or to wheedle a few more minutes with her datapads out of the day; Jyn likes to think she can tell when someone is genuinely asleep. And Andor gives every appearance of sleeping deeply, as Kay’s head swivels between the flight control and Jyn, watching her watch them both. 

The bedroll’s not thick enough to provide much comfort on one’s side, so Jyn follow’s Andor’s lead, shifts to her back, and closes her eyes. She dreams, in fits and starts, of Jedha’s cold red desert, the pale shapes of its moons, the darkness of its nigh sky broken only by a thousand constellations: stars she used to dream about, growing up with Saw’s Partisans, wondering if she’d ever grow to travel them. And now she has, and still, back she goes, called home as inevitably as a comet.

It’s a long, boring trip to Jedha, broken only by Andor emerging from the cockpit midmorning and pulling off his jacket with quick, economical movements. “How much time did you spend training, while you were watching the princess?”

“She’s not a princess,” Jyn says, automatic, though her heart clenches remembering Han’s only occasionally sarcastic nickname for Leia.

Andor shrugs. “It’s what we call her in Intelligence,” he explains. “But you didn’t answer my question.”

She narrows her eyes at him, recalls long hours performing achingly slow forms under Ahsoka’s watchful eye. “I’m better than I was at Horizon.”

“Good,” Andor says. His teeth flash, too quickly for her to judge the expression a grin or a grimace. “So am I.”

He stands loosely, hands relaxed at his sides, but those dark eyes are as sharp as ever. Jyn watches him for a long moment, then shrugs off her coat and sets her baton down on the bench. Her fingerless synthleather gloves she leaves on. Hand to hand it is, then.

Andor shifts, and steps to the side; she instinctively does the same, and they circle the hangar little by little. Jyn dislikes this part, the mirrored orbit of twin suns, as it takes her further from her baton and closer to Kay, with whom she hasn’t yet established trust, thus doubling her disadvantage. She’s unsurprised when Andor stops, with her between him and Kay and him between her and her baton, and so, before his stance solidifies beneath him, Jyn charges.

That she catches him off guard is obvious; he buckles under her assault, dropping quick to the ground and hooking a leg around hers to bring her down with him. Jyn resists the instinct to roll away and extract herself and gets her arm across Andor’s windpipe instead, leaning her weight on that fragile structure; but while she manages to grapple one of his arms into submission, he still has one hand free, and he uses it to jab effectively at her kidney. This instinct she can’t resist; she recoils, curling around it defensively even as she scrambles to her feet and Andor, breathing heavily, does the same. 

He moves to step back, gain some distance, but she won’t let him, won’t let Ahsoka’s lessons go to waste. She presses her attack forward, ignoring the bruise surely forming over her side, lunging forward at him, their earlier positions reversed, the bench and her baton at her back. She seizes him by the shoulders, and he raises his arms to break her grip, but not before she’s used her momentum to swing a knee to his groin, tempering the blow at the last second. This is a practice bout, she reminds herself: no cause to do actual harm. 

In a real fight, that move would have driven him to his knees, if not to the ground entirely, and she would have won the match in seconds. In practice, Andor does not drop; he gets one strong hand around her throat and squeezes, shoving her backward with all the strength he possesses until her back is to the wall. And then Jyn makes the executive decision that this has gone on long enough, and, with all the speed she can muster, she draws her knees to her chest and drops like a stone to the ground, dragging him forward and down until he knocks his head against the wall and has to stagger back, dazed. 

Massaging her throat, Jyn rises, uses her free hand to push sweat-sticky strands of hair out of her face, and makes for Andor, grimly determined to finish this, when Kay is suddenly between them. 

“That is enough,” he says stiffly and with no small amount of distaste, and Jyn wants to snarl, to shove past him and finish the fight on her own terms, but life has taught her discretion, so she settles for glaring murderously instead.

“Paz,” Andor says. He’s found his way to the bench, and is sitting here, fingers delicate on his brow where a bruise has already begun to form. “Paz, Jyn.”

She gestures to Kay. “Was he to step in if I was threatened, then?” Her side throbs where Andor had jabbed at her kidney; even pulling his punches, the result hurts.

“He wasn’t to step in at all,” Andor says wryly. “Kay, a cold pack, if you could.”

“Make that two,” Jyn snaps, and intercepts the first and holds it to her side. Kay, with a baleful look in her direction, leans out of her reach with the second, as though worried she might try to steal that one, too. 

“The point,” Jyn grits out, “of a practice bout is not to hurt each other.”

Andor shakes his head. “The point of a practice bout is to learn how you would react in the real world,” he says. 

“You tempered your blows,” Jyn says acerbically. “Was I not meant to do the same?”

“Certainly. And to live with the consequences, as I did.”

Ignoring Kay—who continues to stand between her and Andor, baleful and cold—Jyn marches to the bench, and clears her baton and coat from it ungracefully. “Move,” she tells Andor. “I want to lay down.”

He shakes his head at her. “Terrible stamina,” he says, but he’s smiling at her as he says it, like a joke, like he’s—like he’s _teasing_ her, and Jyn has absolutely no idea what to make of that.

Fortunately, she doesn’t have to think about it long: Andor gets up and heads for the cockpit, and she can bunch her jacket under her head and lay on the bench, and determinedly not think about how close they’d been, him on the ground and her above, straddling his hips, her arm pressed over his throat. 

They land in the desert, some kilometers from Jedha City, further still from the Partisans’ encampment. “We won’t get within a blaster’s range of them alone,” Jyn had told Andor when he had asked her opinion. “Best we get taken hostage in the City and escorted back to base.”

He’d nodded thoughtfully, and passed the insight on to Kay, and they’d landed in the desert, nothing but the blank stares of fallen monuments around them. 

“Stay with the ship,” Andor tells Kay as they prepare to depart, shrugging into an absurd puffy coat with a furred hood; Jyn, making as though to re-tie the laces of her boots, kneels and ducks her head, listening intently. But Kay offers only petulant concession, and all too soon Andor stands before her.

“Are you ready?” he asks, his tone falling short of brusque. 

Jyn nods tightly and stands. He scrutinizes her.

“Are you really?” he asks.

She shrugs. “As I’ll ever be.”

“Good enough.” He leads them off the ship and into the frigid desert, red dust clouding at their heels as they tramp between canyons wrought by monuments to a religion long abandoned. 

“I have a contact,” he says as they walk. “But he’s just gone missing. His sister will be looking for him. The temple’s been destroyed, but she’ll be there, waiting. We’ll give her your name, and hope that gets us a meeting with Saw.”

“Hope?”

“Yeah,” Andor says. He looks over his shoulder at her, slicing a smile her way. “Rebellions are built on hope.”

“I was in the room when Wellspring outlined her strategy for the Alliance,” Jyn reminds him. 

“My point exactly.”

 _“Strategy,”_ Jyn insists, “and determination, and resources—surely those are more important to rebellions than hope.”

He shrugs. “A rebellion may have strategy and determination and all the resources it could wish for. But without hope it is nothing.”

“Force,” she realizes, “you’re an idealist.”

His mouth twists at that. “Don’t tell Draven.”

She presses her lips shut so as not to laugh. But something else tugs at her curiosity. “You said the temple’s not there anymore.” That hurts: how often had she run around it, through it, seeking refuge with the Guardians of the Whills when the Imps were on her heels? How many times that place had saved her life—had helped get her off Jedha, when the time came. 

Andor nods tightly. “The Imperials razed it—must have been soon after you left. And then they realized there was a kyber deposit beneath the temple, and they’ve been extracting it ever since.”

The words arrest her as surely as a knife to the throat. Andor turns around when he realizes she’s stopped walking. “What’s wrong?”

“I’ve seen this before,” she tells him, choked. Ilum flashes, blinding white and icy darkness, in her mind’s eye. “Crimson Dawn were doing something similar on Ilum.”

He frowns. “Never heard of it.”

She laughs shakily. “Best kept secret in the galaxy,” she says. “Ball of ice in the Outer Rim. Sacred to the Jedi because of its kyber deposits. Crimson Dawn were extracting kyber. We put a stop to it then.”

Andor looks at her narrowly. “We’re not here to put a stop to it,” he warns her. “We’re here to find out what we can.”

“I understand,” Jyn says. She doesn’t like it, but she recognizes the impossibility of just the two of them—well, and Kay—taking on a Star Destroyer. Bone-white, it looms over the city, dwarfing the red stone walls.

In the marketplace nearest the razed ruins of the temple, Cassian leaves her to find his contact’s sister. And a voice calls her, pulls her away with all the strength of her mother’s faith still strung around her neck. 

“I’m Chirrut Îmwe,” says the blind Guardian, smiling past her. He tilts his head, ear-first, toward her,

“How did you know I was wearing a necklace?”

“For that answer, you must pay,” he says, grinning, like it’s a joke she’s not in on. “What do you know about kyber crystals?”

 _Far too much,_ Jyn wants to say. Leia and her sleeve of burnt-white skin, that many-hued saber held high in her hands. Enfys Nest and her people, chained together and made to haul out chunks of crystal. Asajj, dehydrated and heat-stricken, two purple shards clutched in bloody hands. But none of that will she say to a stranger, even if that stranger is a Guardian of the Whills. 

Nor does she intend to speak the words that nevertheless come pouring forth. “My father, he—he said they powered the Jedi’s lightsabers.”

Something goes still in Chirrut Îmwe’s face at that, his broad smile freezing just a little. Jyn glances up, more out of habit than anything else, and sees a heavily armed man, long-haired and grim-faced, watching her closely. She looks back for a few seconds, uncowed, and then Andor is calling her name. 

“Let’s go,” he says, and he’s pushing through the crowd for her. She casts one last look at Chirrut Îmwe and turns to go, but Chirrut Îmwe isn’t done with her yet.

“Remember,” he calls after her, “the strongest stars have hearts of kyber.”

The words seem to echo across space and time to her: old words, lore-words. They reverberate in the fragment of kyber hung round her neck. Jyn places a gloved hand over it, over her shirt and vest and scarf that all hide it, self-consciously, and then Andor is at her side, still in that ridiculous puffy parka.

“We’re not here to make friends,” he snaps, and hustles her away.

But not quick enough. 

It goes like this: 

They are arrested by Imps. They are rescued by Kaytoo, who resented being left behind more than Andor expected. They are cornered by more Imps, and rescued by Chirrut Îmwe and his partner. 

They are captured by Saw’s Partisans, and it’s all Jyn can do to save their lives, her lineage the only shield she can wield in their defense. 

And then: Saw. 

Saw is…not well. His isolation, whatever has soured his relationship with the Alliance, has left him paranoid, seeing enemies in every corner. Jyn hides her shock at his transformation—she recalls a man who stood unaided, always ready to help another; a man almost fanatical in his devotion to his cause. That fanaticism remains. Little else does. His inhaler speaks of survival, possibly of some kind of chemical attack. His prosthetic leg, clunking across the floor, is new. So is the glove on his hand, the grey in his hair. Her heart hurts, looking at him.

“Jyn?” he calls, stepping forth from the shadows. “Is that you?”

“Hi, Saw,” Jyn says. 

“Jyn,” Saw says again. His voice rasps against the air like rough fabric—Tatooine homespun—chafes against skin. He stops, head tilted curious, evaluative, in the cave’s half-light, and pulls the mouthpiece of a respirator to his lips. He inhales deeply once, twice, and releases the mouthpiece to recoil against his chest plate. “Jyn,” he says, her name like a charm uttered three times, “have you come here to kill me?”

She jerks at that, eyes flinching wide with shock. “Have I come here to—no. Saw, no.”

“I know the smell of Alliance Intelligence,” Saw counters. “My soldiers do, too.”

Jyn rallies quickly. “I’m here with an Intelligence officer,” she agrees. “He’s here under orders. But not to kill you.” But even as she says it, doubt creeps in on cold fingers. Andor wouldn’t tell her if he was sent to kill Saw. She has only his word that they’re meant to be looking for her father, that Saw is, somehow, the key to finding Galen again. And how much can a spy be trusted? Spies lie. They must be very good at it to survive. 

She lied, too, for years. Honesty is a gift Asajj and Leia and Wellspring’s wife Sabé gave to her, but Jyn makes herself review Andor’s words, his actions, like she’s laying out all the components of a scandoc. His questions about her father, about her relationship with Saw. His hands, ticking off elements of his strategy. His dark hunter’s eyes, so serious and steadfast, tracking her through Bespin and throughout their sparring session. She thinks of not seeing those eyes again, and the thought fits poorly, like too-small boots in which she has to walk a great long distance, the boots pinching at her toes all the way. 

“He’s Intelligence, yes,” Jyn says, her voice bedrock steady. “But he’s not here to kill you, and neither am I, Saw.” Is it the truth or what she needs to say to keep going? The distinction blurs, like hyperspace, like flame, like the white-fire burn up Leia’s arm, on her cheek. “We’re here in search of my father.”

Saw watches her narrowly. “I haven’t seen Galen since I brought you all to Lah’mu.”

“Nor I since I left him there,” Jyn says. “And yet here I am, at Alliance behest, come to ask of you the impossible. Have you and your Partisans heard of anything that might lead us to my father?”

Saw says nothing for a long moment. His silence is familiar to her, as so little of him is: _better to say nothing,_ he’d said to her often, _than to show weakness._ And the lack of information is, as it has always been, weakness. This is what Jyn reads in his silence now: a lack of information.

Then Saw says, “It is curious to me that you should arrive now, so soon after this.” And his hand reaches into a pocket and withdraws a data stick. 

Jyn stares at it. Her mind races. “What is that?”

“A message,” Saw says. “To you. From Galen.”

Her feet stutter forward a half-step before she remembers herself. 

“How,” Saw says softly, “did you know to come to me now, Jyn?”

“I didn’t,” she says thoughtlessly. She cannot tear her gaze from the data stick on the table. “Andor might’ve. But I didn’t. Saw—can I—” She can’t. Stupid question. “How did this come to you?”

“A man claiming to be an Imperial defector brought it to Jedha, and my agents brought him to me,” Saw says. “He says he was a cargo pilot.” Jyn can feel his eyes on her, sharp as pinpricks. “You know nothing of this?”

“I swear to you,” she says. “I know nothing.” She can’t hold it in any longer. “Saw—please, can you play it?”

“Where have you been all these years, Jyn?” Saw asks, soft and intent.

“Tatooine,” she says, “and with the Alliance.” Her compliance is the price she must pay to see the message, she knows. 

“They asked me about you,” Saw says. “Almost four years ago. Why did they need to do that?”

Leia’s dear face, starfire-scarred on her cheek, flashes before Jyn’s eyes, breaking her stare at the data stick. She blinks, looks to Saw. He scrutinizes her, distrustful. _Tread carefully,_ whispers a voice in her head that sounds like Ahsoka. _Listen close and clever,_ says another voice like rust: Asajj. 

“I was interviewing for a position,” she says. “They wanted a reference.”

“What position?”

“It wasn’t Intelligence,” Jyn says.

“That’s no answer.”

“It’s all the answer you need,” she says. “It’s all the answer I can give.”

He holds up the data stick, staring at it, then at her. “You’re not the same girl I knew.”

All of twenty-two, Jyn fights a smile. “Been a long time since I’ve been a girl, Saw.”

“Not since Lah’mu,” he agrees, and beckons to her. “Come.”

He leads her to the holoprojector, inserts the data stick into the port. She’s still not prepared when a hologram of her father springs up before them, the blue light rendering him pale, gaunt, thin at his edges. Her hand has raised without her permission; she brushes a lock of hair from her face as though she’d meant to all along, and listens.

 _Stardust,_ Galen Erso calls her, and the nickname scatters tears on her cheeks. _Stardust. Father,_ she thinks, her heart one great hurt in her chest, under her mother’s faith. 

“I can’t imagine what you think of me,” Galen’s holo says. Jyn scrubs her eyes. Galen speaks of missing her, missing Lyra, their family. He describes how he stole survival from the Empire, how he took refuge in making something terrible. And then he describes it. 

“We call it the Death Star,” he says heavily. “There is no better name.”

This, then, is the weapon of which Andor had spoken. Fear trickles down her spine like melting snow. But Galen never pauses, never hesitates. He outlines the weakness he’d built, the great revenge he’d hidden in the Empire’s most terrible weapon, but does not once speak of what this weapon can do. Perhaps naming its ability is too terrible a thing. Perhaps that, at last, is too much for him to bear. 

“You’ll need the plans,” Galen’s holo is saying, “the structural plans for the Death Star to find the reactor. I know there’s a complete engineering archive in the data vault at the Citadel Tower on Scarif. Any pressurized explosion to the reactor module will set off a chain reaction that will destroy the entire station.” And that’s it: the holo flickers, and dies out, and Jyn wrenches her gaze from where the image of her father had stood to look for Saw, but Saw’s not where she’d left him: he’s moved to an opening in the cave wall and stands there silhouetted by light and shadow as a great rumble grows in the distance. 

“What,” Jyn chokes out, “what is that?”

But Saw doesn’t answer, doesn’t move; and then Jyn feels eyes at her back and whirls around, but it’s only Andor, a blaster raised and pointed directly at Saw.

She steps between the two of them instinctively. “Put that down,” she hisses, and Andor only hesitates a second before doing so. 

“I found the pilot,” he says.

She looks at him. “How did you know there’d be a pilot?” she asks suspiciously. 

Andor opens his mouth—to answer or to deflect? The latter is more likely—but it’s Saw who speaks. 

“It’s here,” he says emptily, and Jyn cranes her neck over his shoulder to see what he’s talking about. But it’s dark outside, like nighttime or a full solar eclipse, and in the distance, the lights and towers of Jedha City are nowhere to be seen. In their place, a great wall of dust and stone rises and rolls inexorably toward them.

Jyn doesn’t even think about it: She grabs Saw’s hand, shoves at Andor with her free arm, and sets the three of them running toward the entrance. “Get Chirrut!” she shouts at Andor, but he points, and Chirrut Îmwe and his companion and another man, who must be the pilot, are gathered together outside of the cells. The compound is otherwise deserted. The great rumbling grows ever louder around them, until Jyn thinks she can feel the very earth shattering beneath her feet, just from the noise. 

“Kay is on his way!” Andor shouts back at her, and pull’s the pilot’s arm over his own shoulders to support him. “Make for the entrance!”

Chirrut Îmwe and his bearded companion don’t need telling twice, and neither does Jyn—but Saw, Saw lags, his prosthetic boot dragging on the rough-hewn stone, his weight limp as Jyn urges him forward.

“Come on,” she says, “Saw, come on—” But his face is creased with despair, and she knows him too well not to understand the reason why. What good is the sabotage of his Partisans and spies against something that can wreak so much ruin in the blink of an eye? Jedha City is gone. The Partisans’ compound will be, soon. And unless Saw gets over this, he’ll go with it. 

Jyn says, sharp and urgent, still dragging him with her all the while, “You heard the message, too. The reactor—the Citadel Tower at Scarif—we have to tell them. We have to warn them, Saw, so this never happens again.”

“That it happened once is too many times,” he says, each word dislodged like an anchor from a seabed, and as heavy. 

She controls her frustration, the impulse to snap _don’t you think I know that?!_ Neither would do any good here. “I know,” she says, and again: “We have to tell them, Saw.”

“They’ll never believe us,” Saw says. “Not you. Not me.”

“We will make them believe us,” Jyn vows, and daylight breaks over their faces as Chirrut Îmwe’s companion throws open the heavy doors. Kay is there, Andor’s small ship waiting for them, and one after another they clamber aboard. Kay pilots up and away the second everyone is aboard, before the cabin doors are closed, and Jyn grabs for a support, for Saw, as ruin finally swallows up the compound, leaving a terrible fissure in the planet’s crust, magma a roiling gleam in the deep. The heat of it is awful, and incredible. Jyn flinches from the still-open door, only to see Andor watching her with those dark raptor’s eyes, gaze unwavering even as he slaps the controls to close the doors. 

Jyn weaves her way through prone bodies to the cockpit. Kay twists around to stare at her, suspicious despite his inflexible expression, but Andor doesn’t turn. 

“Where are we going?” She pitches her voice low. She doesn’t want to wake the others, Saw and Bodhi Rook least of all, if they’ve managed to find rest amidst the tumult of hyperspace. 

A pause. “Yavin,” Andor says at last. “Yavin 4. A moon. The Alliance has temporarily relocated. We’ll make our report to them there.” 

Jyn processes this. “Doesn’t Alliance leadership typically stay in deep space?”

“That was before Kuat,” Andor says, “and Mandalore, and Naboo.” 

That’s right. “I’d thought leadership had established itself on Naboo.”

But Andor shakes his head. “Too many assassination attempts on the Wellspring and other leaders. They’re on the move. Makes it harder for the Imps to track them down, lessens the threat of a counterstrike on Naboo.”

“They must’ve left very publicly, for that to work.”

“They didn’t. Quietly, so’s not to cause a panic. And one of Wellspring’s handmaidens played her for a day, to give them time to get away.”

Jyn leans against the wall, crosses her arms. She says, “Did you hear the message?”

That does prompt Andor to turn around. “What message? Jyn—what message?”

“My father sent a message to Saw,” she tells him. “He spoke of the Empire’s weapon. The Death Star.”

Andor is out of his seat and before her in the next breath. “Tell me.”

Her mouth is dry all of the sudden, for no good reason. She swallows. “He’s built in a weakness,” she says, and thinks of her father’s words, repeating them now. “It’s well-hidden and unstable. The reactor module. One blast to any part of it will destroy the entire station.”

“How do we identify the reactor module?” Andor whispers.

“The Citadel Tower at Scarif,” Jyn says quietly. “There’s an engineering archive there. He said we can find the plans there.”

“Scarif,” he says, and returns to his seat, pressing his hands to the sockets of his eyes. “Where is the message now?”

She opens her mouth and closes it. In her mind’s eye, she sees Saw insert the data stick into the holoprojector, sees the message play, sees the great wall of dust and rock billowing up at the horizon; her hand grabbing Saw’s. The data stick, abandoned. 

“I didn’t take it,” she says numbly. “I—everything happened so fast—”

A muscle tics in his jaw, but Andor says nothing.

“They’ll still believe us, won’t they?” she asks, pleading.

Andor exhales. “I don’t know,” he says. 

Yavin 4 is hot. Not the dry heat of Tatooine, but a humid wetness that has sweat dampening her hair even as she disembarks from Andor’s ship. Andor leaves his furred parka in the cockpit, and Kaytoo complains irritably about what the humidity is doing to his joints, but the rest are silent. The Holy City of Jedha is gone, and so is Saw’s fortress, and who knows what happened to the Partisans—if they’d got out, or sought refuge in the compound’s catacombs; if they’d been able to outrun the earthly horror unleashed by the the Death Star. 

Davits Draven, his nose as thin as Jyn remembers it being, is waiting for them. So is Sabé.

It is such a relief to see Sabé that Jyn stumbles, her knees cut out from under her. “My lady,” she says, kneeling before her on the hard duracrete before the temple-turned-headquarters of the Alliance. 

“Jyn,” Sabé says, like absolution, like love; like a mother. Her hands reach out and lift Jyn effortlessly to her feet. “It is so good to see you.”

She’s seen Sabé since Horizon base, through the careful, infrequent holos Ahsoka sends to and receives from Leia’s mothers, but not in person, not with her callused hands on Jyn’s. “It’s good to see you, too,” Jyn rasps. Tears sting at her eyes, and she represses them out of habit, but Sabé knows everything there is to know about Jyn, knows everything Jyn wishes no one knew, not even herself, and Sabé has been unfailingly kind to her anyways, unfailingly compassionate. She would not shame Jyn’s tears now, but knowing that does not make it any easier to let them fall. 

Draven is talking to Andor, who is gesturing to the others, but Jyn takes it upon herself to make the introductions, as far as she knows to make them. “I expect you know Saw Gerrera. This is Chirrut Îmwe,” she says to Sabé, “a Guardian of the Whills. And his husband, Baze Malbus.” They’d been introduced on the flight over. “And this is Bodhi Rook, an Imperial defector.”

Sabé’s expression closes off a little at that, but her smile is still warm. “Welcome,” she says. “Please, follow my sister, Rabé—she will see you tended until it is time for the council.” Jyn makes to follow Rabé, too, but Sabé catches her hand. 

“Jyn,” she says softly, “will you come with me and tell me of my daughter?”

There is no way she can say no to that request. Jyn nods mutely, and follows Sabé to the stepped pyramid of the temple. They walk in silence, and Jyn waits, feeling overfull with words, too full to let any of them spill. She hadn’t seen the last missive Ahsoka and Leia had sent. Had they told Sabé and Wellspring about Leia’s injury, her miraculous recovery? Have they been in touch since, to confirm Barriss’ arrival and to tell of Leia’s lightsaber?

Sabé leads her through corridors inside the temple, weaving through harried-looking personnel before they can think to make way for her. She moves so quickly, so smoothly, it’s difficult to register who she is before she’s already passed, and Jyn is the subject of more startled looks than she cares to be, clambering as she is in the wake of Wellspring’s wife. 

The corridors shift: storage to conference rooms to offices to private quarters. Sabé leads her to a door at the end of the hall and keys it open with a card before stepping back and gesturing for Jyn to enter. Jyn does so, but stops short in the doorway.

The Wellspring is there.

“My lady,” Jyn says, fumbling the words in her surprise.

Sabé pushes her gently forward, and closes the door behind them both. 

Jyn glances at the door, and back. The Wellspring is watching her with wide dark eyes that seem to pierce her and root her to the ground, even though the length of the room and of Wellspring’s desk, piled high with flimsi and datapads, separates them. 

“Jyn,” the Wellspring says. “You weren’t expecting me; I apologize.” Her voice is every bit as warm as Sabé’s, and the resemblance strikes Jyn like a blow to the face. Which one of them was actually warm, and which had learned to mimic the other? Must one warmth be a mimic? Good things so rarely come to her; it is second nature to doubt. 

“It’s alright,” Jyn says, dry-mouthed. She smoothes her hands down her trousers. 

“Please,” Sabé says, gesturing to the couch along one wall. “Sit, Jyn.”

Jyn sits down slowly. Sabé takes a seat in a chair across from Jyn, and the Wellspring doesn’t move from behind her desk. 

“How is our daughter?” the Wellspring asks after a long quiet moment. “How is Leia?”

“I don’t know what the last you heard of her is,” Jyn hedges.

“There has been a disturbance in the Force since last we spoke,” the Wellspring says. Her mouth twitches ruefully. “Or so Obi-Wan tells me.”

Jyn takes a breath. “Leia has undergone her trial,” she says hesitantly; she’s still not sure what exactly happened on Ilum, but those had been Ahsoka’s words, and Ahsoka undoubtedly understands—better than Jyn, at least—what had transpired. 

Sabé is frowning, but the Wellspring looks at Jyn with understanding, with fear. “The trial to find her lightsaber crystal,” the Wellspring says. 

“Yes,” Jyn says, relieved to not have to explain it. “On Ilum.” She shakes her head. “I was against it from the beginning, but I was overruled—”

“This is when your paths crossed with Lady Nest?” Sabé asks.

Jyn nods.

“We have heard of the battle with Crimson Dawn,” she says. “We are concerned with our daughter. Was she hurt? Is she alright?”

Jyn takes a breath, needing it to fortify her. She thinks of Leia’s burnt-flame arm, the scar on her cheek, the ease with which she wields her lightsaber; she thinks of Leia’s tears on the eve of Jyn’s departure. There are no easy answers. 

“She was hurt,” Jyn says carefully, “gravely, but made a—a frankly inexplicable recovery. She got separated from us on Ilum. When we found her again, her right arm had been badly burned, from her fingertips to her shoulder. I didn’t think she’d ever recover mobility in it, but within a day, the burn had faded to scar tissue, and she seems to have normal use of her arm, last I saw her.”

“It was while you were separated that she underwent her trial,” says the Wellspring quietly. 

“Yes, my lady.”

“She had a crystal when you found her?” 

“Clutched in her burnt hand, my lady.”

“But she recovered,” Sabé says urgently. “She recovered?”

“You could not have ordered me from her side had she been otherwise,” Jyn says fiercely, forgetting for a second that the Wellspring is in the room, that it had been on the Wellspring’s orders that she’d left Leia with Barriss and Ahsoka. 

But, when she remembers and glances over, the Wellspring is smiling softly at Jyn, at Sabé. “You chose well,” she says to Sabé, nodding at Jyn. 

“I did,” Sabé agrees. She smiles—too beautiful when she does—at Jyn, and Jyn flushes, looks at her shoes. 

The Wellspring rises from behind the desk, goes to Sabé’s side, perches on the arm of her chair like a bird. “Tell us more, please,” she entreats Jyn. “Tell us everything.”

It’s not the kind of debriefing Jyn had anticipated on the journey to Yavin, but it’s sweet and aching to speak of Leia to those who love her so well. She tells them of Leia’s star-scarred smile, the kindness in her eyes, the generosity of her arms when she hugs Jyn. She tells them how studious and diligent and impatient Leia is, how fierce she is in defense of those she loves, how easily she opens her heart to strangers—how warmly Han and Chewbacca have responded to that affection. She tells them of Leia’s and Artoo’s longstanding dejarik rivalry, how close to beating him Leia has come in recent days; she speaks of Leia’s frankness, her fairness, her determination to take the lessons her mothers have imparted to her and apply them wherever she goes. How she braids her hair in the ways they have taught her every day without fail; how instinctively, how—to Jyn’s eyes—masterfully she moves with the Force. 

Both Sabé and the Wellspring are bright-eyed by the end of it, starry with tears, and the Wellspring rises, comes to where Jyn sits, and kneels before her. She takes Jyn’s hands in her own and kisses her knuckles. “Thank you,” she says.

The debriefing Jyn had expected takes place shortly after. Sabé guides her from her and the Wellspring’s quarters to a conference room where Andor and the rest of the Jedhan refugees are waiting, Chirrut and Baze and Bodhi and Saw. Andor opens his mouth, perhaps to ask where she’d been, but shuts it at the sight of Sabé. Jyn, not knowing how long they’ve got until they brief the council, nor really in a state to care, nods to Andor, and makes for Saw. 

He’s sitting off to the side, isolated. She notices that Bodhi Rook is sitting as far away as he can possibly get from Saw and thinks, grim, of what she’d seen Bor Gullet do to those unlucky enough to be subjected to it before she’d left—been abandoned by—Saw. She hesitates, caught between them, and Andor catches her. 

“What did the Wellspring want?” he whispers.

“How did—”

“That’s the Wellspring’s wife,” Andor says, and fair enough: as circumstantial evidence goes, that’s pretty strong.

“To hear about their daughter,” Jyn says.

“They didn’t ask about Jedha?”

“No,” Jyn says, “and I didn’t volunteer. I thought you’d want to confer on the best way to present our findings.”

“Which is why you walked right by me,” Andor says, a little sarcastic. 

Jyn shrugs. “I wanted to check on Saw first. So what are we telling them?”

“The truth,” Andor says, as though there could be no other answer. She supposes there isn’t. 

“I meant,” she says, “where do we start?”

He blinks at her, his face too blank to be anything but a non-expression of surprise, recalculation. “With our arrival at the temple,” he decides. “We need to explain how we came back to them with four additional beings. I’ll handle that part through our arrival at the compound. You tell them what happened with Saw, about the message from your father. I’ll explain Bodhi. He’ll need to testify as well.”

Jyn dares a glance at Bodhi over Andor’s shoulder. He’s got his head in his hands, eyes huge in his face, staring at the ground. “Are you sure he can testify?”

“I’ll make sure,” Andor promises. “You see to Saw. I’ll see to Bodhi.”

She crosses the room then, no hand shooting out to stop her. Saw doesn’t react as she sits beside him, staring off into the distance. 

“Saw,” Jyn says softly. From the corner of her eye, she can see Andor crouched before Bodhi Rook, undoubtedly saying the same thing she’s about to say to Saw. “Saw, I need you to look at me.”

Slowly, as though with enormous effort, Saw rolls his head to the side to look at her. “Jyn,” he says slowly. 

“Saw,” she says. “Saw, you’ll need to testify as to what happened on Jedha.”

“What happened on Jedha,” he echoes. “What did happen on Jedha, Jyn?”

She swallows. She’s not much clearer than he is on what happened. The truth, Andor had said. So tell the truth: only what she saw. “You need to confirm my account of my father’s message,” she says. “The trap he laid in the Death Star. And you need to tell them about what happened to Jedha City.” 

His eyes sharpen. “The horror,” he says.

“Yes,” Jyn says. That great rushing wall of stone and dust lives in the dark of her lids whenever she closes her eyes. The sound of it. The quake of the earth. The horror of impending annihilation. 

Saw shifts in his seat. “I will testify,” he murmurs. “They must know.”

“Yes,” Jyn says again, and nothing more, until the doors open and the Alliance’s councillors enter, one or two at a time. Some of them Jyn recognizes by face from Horizon, four years ago; but it’s only the Wellspring and Sabé—and Davits Draven, close on their heels—that she can name. 

The council is smaller than she’d remembered, but the difference in size is quickly explained by the holo projectors that a few beings lug in and place strategically around the room. One by one, the holos are activated, and here Jyn has greater luck in naming those present: most of them are Jedi, and she’s heard enough of them, Leia’s extended family, from Leia and Ahsoka to put names to faces. There is Mace Windu, and Shaak Ti, and Luminara Unduli, and Yoda. Obi-Wan Kenobi is physically present in the room, slipping in at the councillors’ tail with a red-haired woman in pure white robes and a dark-haired man with kind eyes belying the stern set of his mouth. 

The Wellspring sits gracefully at the center of the circle of chairs arrayed in the middle of the room. Her face has been painted since Jyn last saw her, a pale, powdery white with marks on her cheek and a red stripe on her bottom lip; her hair has been elaborately twisted up, no longer loose and curly. Sabé sits a half-step behind her at her right, her hair similarly pulled back, her face unpowdered. Obi-Wan Kenobi takes the seat at the Wellspring’s left hand, and at this apparent signal, the rest of the councillors take their seats, too. She’s like a queen holding court, Jyn thinks suddenly, watching the Wellspring’s high-held chin, the regality of her garments, the way everyone else waits for her, on her. The thought sits discomfortingly, prickling at the back of her neck. She tucks her hair behind her ears, though it’ll just fall forward again in a minute, and waits to be called upon to speak. 

Andor goes first: he precisely, concisely, explains the circumstances under which he was sent to retrieve Jyn, their journey to Jedha, their arrival at the temple of the Holy City, his conversation with his contact’s sister. Here, he gestures to Jyn, turning the floor to her. She tells the assembly of her encounter with Chirrut Îmwe, his rescue of them from stormtroopers; their capture by the Partisans, their conveyance to Saw’s compound in the mountains. Then, she has to steel herself, her father’s voice still echoing in her skull as fast as neurons can carry it. 

“It’s called the Death Star,” she says, and swallows, and repeats Galen’s words: “There is no better name.” She tells them of Galen’s trap, that infinitesimal and infinitely powerful flaw he’d built into the station’s reactor module, how a single explosion to the module will destroy the entire station, that the plans—the full, complete plans Galen couldn’t smuggle out—are at Scarif’s Citadel Tower. How she forgot the data stick containing the message in her haste to get them all out alive. 

And then it’s time for Saw to speak of the horror. 

Jyn doesn’t know what exactly caused the break between the Alliance and the Partisans, but it’s all too easy to guess. Saw has always cared about ends more than means, and if there’s one thing Jyn’s learned from Leia and Ahsoka over the past four years, it’s that the Wellspring views the two as inextricable. To err in one’s methodology is to damn the result. The Wellspring would not have condoned the use of Bor Gullet on Bodhi Rook; she would not have condoned the use of child soldiers, she would not have tolerated Jyn’s own weaponization. Or perhaps that’s wishful thinking: nothing but a fantasy that someone, somewhere, would have cared enough to let her be a child, to spare her the countless cruelties of being made to wage war, however just that war might have been. 

The point is: the break between the Alliance and the Partisans exists, but so does a history of collaboration and mutual aid. Some of these councillors might still esteem Saw, or the work that he’s done, or, if nothing else, the history that lies between their two parties. Stars, she hopes so. 

Saw has always been a commanding speaker. His exhaustion, his sense of loss, do not make him less so now. Clunking from his seat to the center of the room, Saw waits until all eyes are upon him, and then he speaks. Like nothing he’s ever seen, he says. The horizon lost, devoured by a monstrous, roiling cloud of dust and earth. The unnatural shaking of the ground, of the mountain; the eclipsed sun a portent of immediate doom. The fiery gleam of magma in the great scar left on the planet’s crust; the disasters that will soon follow, violence felt over the planet’s whole surface. 

When he finishes, there is silence. 

“So,” says the dark-haired man at last, “we know it can destroy asteroids. And we know it can destroy cities. Continents, even.”

“The degree of disruption is such that its effects will be felt on a planetary scale,” Obi-Wan points out. “This weapon…if the Empire has not already plotted for it to destroy planets, they will soon.”

The red-haired woman speaks next. “We must send aid to Jedha at the earliest opportunity. There will be refugees. We must prepare our own planets to welcome them.”

“We get ahead of ourselves,” another woman argues. “We must first decide what to do for this, this battle station.”

“We can do both,” the Wellspring says calmly, and silence immediately falls. “Mon,” she says to the red-haired woman, “will you oversee the relief effort?”

Mon nods her assent. 

“Then let us table that for the moment, so we do not waste our agents’ time,” the Wellspring says. “I would hear from the pilot who brought the message.”

Bodhi glances up, looking hunted. 

“Pilot Rook,” the Wellspring says gently, “where and when did you last see Galen Erso?”

“Eadu,” Bodhi says after a brief pause, “three rotations ago.”

“How did he come to trust you to deliver the message to the Partisans?”

Bodhi looks down at his hands. “We’re—” His eyes dart to Jyn and back down, almost too fast for her to register. “We’re friends. We have been for years. And I’m from Jedha—it must’ve made sense for him to ask me.”

Draven shifts in his seat, his eyes sharp on Bodhi, and Jyn wants to step between them, irrationally protective of Bodhi Rook. Maybe it’s his obvious distress. Maybe it’s the way his big brown eyes remind her of Leia. But she stays where she is, unwilling to play her hand when she doesn’t have all the sabacc cards she needs. 

Because this she knows, without knowing how she does: Bodhi Rook is lying. She doesn’t know why, or what about, but there is something he is not saying. 

The Wellspring hums, and turns back to Andor. “Captain Andor,” she says, “what would you recommend for our course of action?”

Andor does not look at her as he says, “I recommend that we go to Eadu and return with Galen Erso.”

Jyn stares at him. 

“Explain,” says Obi-Wan Kenobi. 

“It is the less risky course of action,” Andor says. “An assault on Scarif would be under-informed. We have only Galen Erso’s word for it, and his daughter’s for him. It would be more prudent to retrieve Erso and fully debrief him before planning an attack on the Citadel Tower.”

“But—” Jyn can’t believe she’s saying this, has to swallow around what feels like a clod of earth in her throat. “—do we have time to retrieve him?”

The Wellspring tilts her head and gestures for Jyn to continue. 

Jyn swallows again. “I know what he said,” she says. “I know it. Saw was there: he can verify what I’ve told you. But as long as that—that _thing_ is out there, we risk its being used. We risk its escalation. We need to—to destroy it as soon as possible. If my father says the best way of doing so is retrieving the plans from Scarif, I believe him.”

“Your father,” Draven say wryly, “is an Imperial Science Officer. There are questions as to his loyalties.”

Jyn turns from him and looks directly at the Wellspring. “Are there questions as to mine?”

The Wellspring holds her gaze for a long moment, as though she can search Jyn’s very soul and find any answer she seeks. “No,” she says. “There are none. I vouch for Jyn Erso’s loyalty. She has spent the past four years in personal service to me. She is beyond doubt.”

 _I don’t know that I’d go that far,_ Jyn thinks, but she holds her tongue, and turns her eyes to Draven, waiting for his next move. 

“I do not question Jyn Erso’s loyalty,” Draven says slowly but clearly, enunciating each word. “I question her father’s. This could be a trap.”

“If it is a trap,” Andor says quietly, “they have baited it with something real and deadly. We are obligated to act.”

“We are not obligated to act recklessly,” the dark-haired man from before says. “Do we have intelligence as to an impending deployment of this weapon?”

“No, Senator Organa,” Andor says, dropping his eyes. “But neither did we have warning of its use on Jedha. It is an instrument of terror. It is not to the Empire’s advantage to give advance warning of its use.”

“I see,” says Senator Organa. “In that case, I support Captain Andor’s plan. We must verify Erso’s intelligence before we act on it.”

“I second,” Draven says quickly. But all eyes turn to the Wellspring, who sits still and unmoving, her gaze distant. 

“We are caught,” the Wellspring says at last, “between two conflicting drives: the need for immediate action against this Death Star, and the need for further intelligence. But we cannot act if we do not have sufficient knowledge of our enemy. I therefore concur with my colleagues: we must retrieve Galen Erso from Eadu before we move on Scarif, if that is indeed where our next course of action will take us.”

She looks at Andor, at Jyn. “Cassian,” she says, “Jyn. I entrust this mission to you.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been so long since I've posted or replied to comments! but I want you all to know how much I treasure every comment on this fic. As many of you have noted, this is a labor of love, and it is such a gift to be able to see it received with such generosity. 
> 
> I've got the next two chapters written already, so you'll see posting back here soon--I'm going to try to get on a monthly schedule, but this coming semester is going to be kind of nuts, so I might vanish April-May. But fingers crossed this gets finished this year!
> 
> Happy New Year to everyone--may 2021 treat us all kindly, may we treat ourselves and each other with compassion and understanding, may we grow and forge friendships and have time to RELAX. Love to you all.


	6. six: flight from bespin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blinking in the semi-dark, Leia swings her legs out from the blankets, and tugs on her shoes absentmindedly as Artoo whirs to alertness at the foot of her bed. It’ll come to her; she’s still sleep-dulled and hazy, but it’ll come to her. Something bright in the dark, a halo of golden light bursting at the edges of her awareness, ringed like a solar eclipse—

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: canon-typical violence (more info in the end note if you want it)

Leia starts awake. It’s still dark, or as dark as it ever gets in Cloud City; the rosy banks of clouds retain and reflect the city’s nighttime light, making it difficult to sleep unless you’re used to sleeping in the bright whirl of hyperspace. Leia leaves her window shades up when she can get away with it—Socks doesn’t like the exposure—and sleeps in the dusky half light once her eyes close without her permission. Clouds, this close, are still a novelty, and she wears herself out gazing at them and wishing, desperately, that she could traverse them herself, just walk on a misting road of cloud and sky until she gets back home. 

Not that there’s a home to go back to, now that Luke’s run from it. She tries not to think about it. But that’s not what had woken her.

Blinking in the semi-dark, Leia swings her legs out from the blankets, and tugs on her shoes absentmindedly as Artoo whirs to alertness at the foot of her bed. It’ll come to her; she’s still sleep-dulled and hazy, but it’ll come to her. Something bright in the dark, a halo of golden light bursting at the edges of her awareness, ringed like a solar eclipse—

Leia trips, and jerks herself to her feet, panic like electricity twitching up her spine. Artoo whistles a query, but she can’t answer, doesn’t stop. She slides her door open with clumsy, shaking hands, and hesitates once outside, casting a long look at the door to their suite, locking out the rest of the city. Her fingers ache to open it. Only her better judgement makes her turn instead to Ahsoka’s door, Artoo at her heels.

She slides it open, her hands still trembling, and activates the lights. Ahsoka shoves upright, blinking sleep from her eyes, her hands automatically going for her sabers and for Barriss, rousing already behind her. As soon as she sees Leia, though, she relaxes, dropping her sabers back to the bedside table.

“Leia,” Ahsoka says, “what’s—” But then her eyes grow huge in her face, and she tears off the blanket, shoving her own feet into her boots. “Barriss—get up, we have to go.”

Barriss heaves herself upright, and opens her mouth, but sees Ahsoka’s face and shuts it instead of asking questions. Ahsoka grabs Leia’s shoulder. “Go wake up Han and Chewbacca.”

Leia hesitates, allows resolve to steel her spine. “We’re not running,” she says quietly.

“Yes,” Ahsoka says, sweeping any belongings into her rucksack, “we are. Your mothers entrusted me with your safety, Leia. He’s already got Luke. The only way he’s getting to you is through me.”

Leia swallows, stands a little straighter, eking out any spare millimeter of height from her frame. “We are not,” she says again, “running away.”

“Leia,” Barriss says, wrapping a scarf around her hair, “do as Ahsoka says and go wake the others.”

“It’s Luke,” Leia says. “It’s my brother, and—”

“But Luke isn’t alone,” Ahsoka snaps. “We don’t know what game Anakin is playing, but we cannot risk losing you to him. I refuse to fail your mothers, to fail you. Wake the others, and pack your things, Leia, or I will carry you to the ship myself.”

Mutinously, Leia goes, Artoo claustrophobically close behind her. The eclipse grows in the periphery of her consciousness, abyssal black ringed with gold. Her hand, no longer shaking, rises to touch the star-scar on her cheek. Artoo whistles anxiously and butts around her to go shriek at Han and Chewie’s doors, but Leia—Leia pauses before the suite door. Her hands itch to open it. 

Han bursts into the main room, still in his pajamas like the rest of them, tugging his boots on as he hops one-footed toward her. “What the hell is going on? What’s the emergency?”

“My brother is here,” Leia says, “and my father is with him.”

Han swears feelingly, and hops back toward the hall. “Chewie!”

There’s a disgruntled bellow from down the hall, but Chewie sticks his head around the corner, and Artoo whirs from behind him into the central room. 

“My comm,” says Han, and Chewie tosses it to him, and Han immediately tunes it to a frequency. “Lando—sorry to wake you, but trouble’s here. We’ve got to run.”

Lando says something in return, but Leia isn’t paying attention. Artoo’s photoreceptor is directed right at her, and he shifts on his arms before whistling sharply and zooming toward her—no, toward the suite doors. He plants himself there, between her and the doors, and emits an angry, burbling whistle. 

She checks to see that Han and Chewie have returned to their rooms, that Ahsoka has yet to appear with Barriss, and kneels down before Artoo. “It’s Luke,” she whispers, and as angry as she is with him—and it is blisteringly angry—she misses him more, and this is the closest they’ve been in nearly four years. “It’s Luke, and he’s here, and we have to save him.”

Artoo warbles dubiously, and then, chastises her sharply. _Anakin is with him_ , she understands this to mean, exactly Ahsoka’s point. Frustrated, she rises—just as Ahsoka enters the room. 

“I packed for you,” Ahsoka says, and hands off Leia’s travel case and rucksack to her. “Essentials are in the rucksack. We might have to abandon the travel case.” She turns back to the two hallways and raises her voice: “Let’s go!”

Barriss, Chewbacca, and Han—in that order—hurry into the room. Ahsoka grabs Leia’s hand and opens the doors. 

Lando, somehow impeccably coiffed despite the hour, is on the other side, a unit of guards at his back, and that man with the cybernetic headpiece. He smiles at them, his white teeth gleaming. “I thought you could use an escort,” he says, but Ahsoka cuts him off.

“We could use a diversion,” she says, and his look grows shrewd. 

“That kind of trouble,” he says thoughtfully, and nods to the cyborg. “I’ll accompany you as far as your ship. They’ll create your diversion.”

“It’s at takeoff that we could most use the diversion,” Ahsoka says meaningfully, and Lando nods.

“See to it,” he orders the cyborg and the guards, and gestures to Ahsoka. “This way.”

They stay clear of the main thoroughfares, keeping to service passages and residential corridors. Even this late, or this early, the ways are populated, beings leaving for work or coming home from a night of gambling. A group as large and as mixed as theirs stands out amidst the solitary beings and couples, and their haste marks them, too, but never does Ahsoka slow her pace. Her hand is like iron on Leia’s, the grip so fierce it hurts, but Leia says nothing, holds on just as tight. She’d wanted to leave and go to Luke, but this—this is the smarter plan, and now that they’re committed to it, she would rather hold no hand more than Ahsoka’s. 

“Tell me,” Lando murmurs to Ahsoka as they walk, “about this trouble you’ve brought to my city.”

Leia bristles at the veiled accusation, but Ahsoka is unruffled. “They’re unlikely to stay once they realize we’ve gone,” she says, “and they’re lone agents. No backing from the Empire or the Alliance or any of the syndicates.”

“So not dangerous?”

Ahsoka shakes her head. “I didn’t say that,” she says. “There will be a man with them. He’s probably the most dangerous being you’ll ever meet. Stay well clear of him.”

“Lady Ventress is with them,” Leia reminds Ahsoka in an undertone, Ventress a violet flare of bit-quick patience in the edges of her awareness, and Ahsoka looks at her, taken aback.

“I’d forgotten,” she murmurs, but turns to Lando again. “There will be four of them, at least. Three Force-users. I’d recommend not letting them land.”

“Hm,” says Lando inscrutably. “We’ll see what we can do.”

They go the rest of the way in silence, Lando leading them with gestures and signals, eschewing speech. Soon enough, they’re outside on their landing platform, the _Millennium Falcon_ gleaming in the light of the dawn. Chewie jogs ahead of them as Lando slows, to extend the boarding ramp and fire up the _Falcon_ ’s engines, and Ahsoka presses Leia’s hand into Barriss’, and ushers them after him. 

Barriss hurries Leia up the gangplank and into the _Falcon_ ’s dim interior, Artoo at their heels and eager to run diagnostics on anything he can reach. Inside, she dumps her travel case in the room she’d shared with Jyn and Ahsoka—a room she’ll now share with Ahsoka and Barriss, and isn’t that a realization she needs to have right now—and then makes for the cockpit, where Chewie is anxiously performing preflight checks. Ahsoka is still talking to Lando, not that Leia can hear what’s being said, and Han is standing a little to the side, his face still creased with sleep and made rough with heartache. 

Ahsoka finishes talking, and listens intently for a moment as Lando talks; then she nods, shakes his hand, and makes for the boarding ramp. But Han lingers another moment still; his hand snakes out and catches Lando’s with more grace than Leia is used to seeing from him, and then Lando hauls him in close, hugs him tightly, kisses the side of his face, what he can reach without letting go. And Leia, suddenly and acutely embarrassed to be witnessing this intensely tender, private intimacy, looks to her knees, and does not look up again until Han, flushed and brushing curtly at his eyes, enters the cockpit. 

“Alright, what’s the flight plan, then?” he asks brusquely, and Ahsoka and Barriss exchange one long look.

“Well?” Han asks again.

“Thape,” Ahsoka says firmly.

Chewie rumbles, _Never heard of it_ , and Barriss leans back in her seat.

“No reason why you would have,” she says, as the _Falcon_ alights from its landing platform. “It’s not represented in the Senate. It doesn’t have an official population. It’s been abandoned except for a strategic outpost for millennia.” Her eyes gleam. “But the Jedi remember it.”

“So do the Naboo,” Ahsoka murmurs. Lando is a tiny figure below them, and Leia leans forward, unable to help herself, as he grows vanishingly small, and is finally covered by cloud. 

“So we’re hoping for reinforcements?” Han asks. Ahsoka opens her mouth—

But Leia, an answer older than she is springing to her lips, replies. 

“No,” she says. “We’re looking for answers.”

In orbit above Cloud City, Luke watches his father stare out the viewport. Ventress watches Anakin, too. Hondo, looking bored, flips sabacc cards on the dashboard. Anakin had claimed the pilot’s seat nearly as soon as Luke had finished his lightsaber, and he has yet to relinquish it back to Hondo or to Ventress. Neither have asked him to do so. Luke expects this state of affairs will continue as long as they’re all cooped up on Hondo’s ship like this. 

Luke leans forward. “What are we waiting for?” he whispers. He can barely sense Leia, only enough to know that she’s close. There’s a frisson of fear where their bond used to be; he can’t tell if it comes from her or if he’s just desperate enough to think he might feel something of her mood. 

For a long moment, Anakin says nothing, still staring at Bespin as though he could see through the clouds and gas of its atmosphere down to the city below. And then he stirs, as though just realizing Luke had asked a question. 

“She’s with Ahsoka,” he says, and Luke freezes as though caught in a lie. “I can feel them both. And they...can feel me.”

Quashing the ugly pulse of jealousy that rouses at his father’s words, Luke says, “They’ll run.” _We’re wasting time_ , he means, and _we’ll never catch them again._

“Oh, I know,” Anakin says, somehow supremely unworried. He glances back at Luke and smiles, teeth bared and sharp. “You forget,” Anakin says: “I trained Ahsoka. I taught her everything she knows. Right now, she is getting your sister and their party to their ship. No doubt she will create a diversion of some kind. I’m guessing inciting some kind of mass evacuation so that her ship will be lost in the crowd. As soon as they clear Bespin’s gravity well—jump to lightspeed, and they’re free to hide out somewhere suitably obscure until she feels safe enough to relocate again.”

It does sound like what Socks would do. Luke swallows bile.

“It suits me better,” Anakin continues, “not to have an audience for this particular reunion. Obscurity is to our advantage, Luke.”

“But if they jump to hyperspace—”

“I made a call earlier,” Anakin says, unperturbed. “An old Imperial who owed me his life. He’s put a tracking beacon on their ship.” He takes out what must be the beacon’s tracker and sets it on the dashboard, upsetting Hondo’s cards in the doing. 

Hondo looks to Ventress as though for help; she looks to Luke, one severe brow raised, as though to say, _what did you expect?_

Luke doesn’t know what he expected. All he knows is that the cunning strategist in front of him seems alien, somehow, for all that he looks like and sounds like Anakin Skywalker. But he’d never seen his father plotting out a battle before, never witnessed him in the midst of a bloody campaign except for those few, sparing moments when Anakin would come back to their suite above Mandalore and rest, his eyes blue and crinkled at their corners with a smile as bright as a sun. 

But Luke won’t say that to Anakin, and certainly not to Ventress while they have an audience. He looks instead to his father. “We don’t know where they’re going.”

“We’ll catch up, wherever they go,” Anakin says. It sounds almost like a threat. 

“No, I mean—” Luke licks his lips. “Won’t they feel us coming? Like they did now?”

“It was to our advantage to be noticed, this time,” Anakin says. “Next time it won’t be. But you have ample experience shrouding your presence in the Force, Luke. All we have to do is follow your example, and they won’t detect us.”

Luke swallows, dry this time, and stares determinedly out the viewport. His eyes burn with salt, and Bespin blurs before him, all rose-gold and glimmering in the far-off light of its sun. He doesn’t know why Anakin’s plan fills him with dread, why he feels that carrying it out is an act of betrayal so acute that Leia will never forgive him, but it does, and he does. 

It’s Ventress—somehow, this is still a surprise—who comes to his rescue. “Why,” she says, sounding deathly bored, “don’t we just comm them and ask to meet?”

The relief Luke feels at this suggestion breaks over him like a tide. He sags back into his seat, but Anakin has not moved, does not even look over his shoulder to acknowledge Ventress’ scrutiny. “As if they’d accept to meet us,” he says.

“They might,” Ventress says, and leans forward in her seat. “If you treat your daughter as an enemy combatant, you determine her role in your life.”

In a flash, Anakin is standing, hand outstretched, the Force caving to his will and clutching the vulnerable tissue of Ventress’ throat. She gasps, airless, and flies backward, pinned to the cockpit door by that phantom grip at her neck. Her hands scramble uselessly for the sabers at her hips, but succeed only in dislodging them. One after another, they clatter to the floor and remain there.

Luke wrenches himself free from his horror-induced shock and shoves himself between Ventress and his father.

“Let her go,” he cries.

But Anakin is unmoved. His eyes blaze gold in his face. Only once before has Luke felt this afraid of Anakin, and the fear and its memory paralyze him, freeze his feet to the ground and his hands to his sides. 

Behind him, Ventress continues to struggle. And behind Anakin, Hondo raises a blaster to Anakin’s head.

“Do as the boy says,” Hondo Ohnaka says silkily, “or we put an end to you and all your trouble right now.”

Luke presses desperately forward. “Is this who you are?”

Whether at the threat or the question, Anakin stills; his hand drops back to his side, and the gold recedes from his irises, leaving only blue in its wake. Ventress crumples to the ground, and Luke goes to her at once, shaking with terror that she might be dead—

But she sits upright, a hand massaging her throat, her other hand gathering her lightsabers back to her. Unsteadily, she climbs to her feet, and raises her chin to look Anakin in the eye.

“You’re right,” she rasps, barely audible. “They wouldn’t agree to a meeting. And they would be right not to do so.”

Anakin looks away at that, a muscle jumping in his jaw. And then, on the planet below, a flurry of motion, as more than twenty ships burst through Bespin’s atmosphere and hare off in different directions.

“Look,” Luke says, shocked again, and Anakin turns, batting Hondo and his blaster irritably out of the way as he resettles in the pilot’s seat and takes the ship’s controls. 

“Right on time,” Anakin murmurs, a smirk giving his mouth a cruel twist. The beacon, still on the dashboard, activates, identifying an old freighter in the distance as the ship they need to pursue. Anakin half-glances back at Luke. “Strap in,” he orders. “This is where the fun begins.”

But Luke can’t stay here to watch his father hunt his sister, his family, across the stars. Perhaps that’s a weakness—an inability to confront the reality he’s made by releasing Anakin from Naboo custody—but if he has to watch this happen, he’ll lose something of himself. Or maybe that’s just the nausea talking. 

In any case, he can’t stay, so he doesn’t: he lurches out of his seat and to the cockpit door, and through it. Ventress, he thinks wildly, will know what to do. 

Ventress is in her quarters, nursing her wounds and pride, a cold compress held gingerly to her throat. Only silence greets Luke’s knock on the closed door, but when he slides it partway open, she beckons him in.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, settling cross-legged before her. Shame grows thick in his belly, his throat. “I—” _I’ve never seen him like that_ , he wants to say, _never knew he could do such a thing_. But he had known, hadn’t he? He’d seen Anakin lop off Uncle Obi-Wan’s hand on Cyphar, had himself been threatened with torture when he’d refused to name the girl with stars on her cheeks. He’d sensed his father’s wrath from across the _Devastator_ and known how deadly it was to provoke that wrath. Luke squeezes his eyes shut. He wants to cry. He doesn’t have the luxury of crying. _A shield_ , he’d said, in the quiet of his own quarters, a promise made to the crystal that had chosen him. What a joke. 

“You begin to see, now,” Ventress rasps, “how difficult the task you have appointed yourself will be.”

“Yes,” Luke whispers. It feels impossible. 

“It may be impossible,” she tells him, an echo of his thoughts. “A display such as this does not give me hope.”

Luke nods tightly and says nothing. 

“Poor precious boy,” Ventress says softly, “made to carry the Galaxy on your shoulders. I do not envy you. But neither do I pity you.”

“What’ll we do,” he whispers, “when he catches up to them?”

She tilts her head. “What do you want to do?”

He doesn’t even have to think about it. “Protect Leia.”

“Then that is what we will do,” she says. “He may have gotten the jump on me this time, but he won’t again; and Ahsoka is a formidable opponent. And I’d be surprised if the Wellspring hasn’t sent another Jedi to your sister since our escape.”

“You think so?” He can’t keep the hope from his voice. Three against one: even Anakin would have trouble with those odds. He hopes, at least, that that is the case. 

“I do. You forget: your father and I were great enemies during the Clone Wars. We fought many times. He—”

But the door behind Luke slides open again, and Ventress silences herself, eyes dark and glittering in the room’s harsh lighting. 

Luke braces himself, and turns to see. Anakin looms over him, over them both. Like Ventress, Luke says nothing, and waits.

“I came to find you,” Anakin says at last, looking to Luke. “They’ve jumped to hyperspace. We have their heading. They’re moving towards the Core.”

“You owe Lady Ventress an apology,” Luke says sharply. 

That muscle jumps in his jaw again. “We’re preparing to jump after them,” Anakin says, curt. 

Luke clambers to his feet, ekes out every centimeter of height he has to stand tall. “You need to apologize.” He can’t find the words to express just how necessary the apology is, can only reiterate that necessity. But this is a moment of reckoning for Anakin, one of many that will come upon him. He can choose either to grow or to regress. There is no middle ground. 

Anakin, finally, meets Luke’s gaze, and holds it for a long moment. Luke stands as though suspended by a fraying rope over an abyss, knowing every moment could be the last—the last what? The last moment in which he will be able to hope for his father? No, he can’t see himself giving up so easily, and yet—something in him will break, if Anakin refuses responsibility for himself yet again, if he refuses to be held accountable, if he refuses to humble himself only so much as to apologize. It will break, and do so irreparably. 

Luke is damaged already. He knows this, can see this knowledge as though from the corner of his eye, even when he holds his head perfectly still and his eyes directly forward. He is stranger than he was; he shakes and starts and has been known to hear voices, or invent them in his isolation. He is—not quite right. 

He does not want to break anymore than he has already. 

But this choice must be Anakin’s, can only be Anakin’s, if it is to mean anything at all. So Luke holds his tongue and his father’s gaze, chin raised and expression as blank as he can make it, and he waits.

And then: miracle of miracles, Anakin looks over Luke’s shoulder to Ventress and inclines his head.

“I...overreacted,” he says, still curt. He clears his throat. “I should not have done so.”

“No,” Ventress says, her voice still gravel-rough. “You should not have.”

That muscle in his jaw tics again. “My apologies,” Anakin says grudgingly, and then, “Come, Luke.” His black cloak flares around him as he exits the room. 

Luke looks to Ventress. “Will you be alright?”

She leans against the wall, eyes slipping closed, the compress once again at her throat. “I’m very hard to kill.”

That’s not an answer, least of all a reassuring one, but Luke finds himself soothed by it nonetheless. He goes after his father, and slides the door closed behind him. 

Anakin is back in the cockpit by the time Luke catches up with him, Hondo nowhere to be seen.

“Do you owe him an apology, too?” Luke asks suspiciously.

Anakin shoots him a withering look, offended by the very suggestion. “Sit down, Luke. I’m going to teach you how to track a ship through hyperspace.”

The bottom of his stomach drops out. Luke sits gingerly in the copilot’s seat. “I thought that was impossible.”

“Just impossibly difficult. It’s not a perfect method. It’s quite likely we’ll overshoot them or fall far behind as we track them. But it’s better than waiting here for their beacon to resurface.” He taps the navcomputer and pulls up a cosmograph of the galaxy, one that holds even the Outer Rim in its view. “Where would they go, Luke?”

Luke frowns at him. “I don’t know.”

“I know you don’t. Guess.”

Oh, it’s—it’s one of Anakin’s didactic lessons again. Luke turns his frown to the cosmograph. “Not the Core,” he says, thinking aloud. “The Alliance isn’t well established there. And with the Emperor—it’s too dangerous, he might sense Leia.”

“Right,” Anakin says, and waits.

Luke manipulates the edges of the map, scanning the Outer Rim. “It’s equally dicey in the Rim,” he says. “There’s the Hutts to contend with. And the syndicates. And you— _we_ —found them here before. What’s to stop that from happening again?”

“Good,” Anakin says, warm with approval. Luke shivers with how much he craves that approval, with how much he hates himself for craving it,

“That leaves the Mid Rim,” he says. “This side of the Core, it’s well populated with Alliance worlds and outposts. Kuat is secured. But it’ll be mobilizing for battle. They wouldn’t want to be in the way of whoever’s in charge there.”

Anakin taps his gloved fingers on the dashboard. “What about Naboo?”

In his mind’s eye, he sees Leia stood tall amidst the shining silver coils of the great dragon, _**HOW COULD YOU**_ a silent, deafening cry between them.

“They won’t go to Naboo,” Luke says quietly. “I unmade that possibility for them when I set you free. They know you could find her there. That you would expect to find her there. They would try to stay hidden as long as they could.”

Anakin lays his hand gently over the nape of Luke’s neck. The pressure paralyzes. Luke does not move, can barely breathe. 

“Very good, Luke,” Anakin says. He does not lift his hand. “That mirrors my own thinking.” He finally moves his hand and points to the cosmograph. “We’ll take the Corellian Trade Spine into the Mid Rim. Exit around Javin and Cyphar”—here, he glances to Luke—“and see if they’ve dropped from hyperspace yet. If they have, they’ll be easy enough to track down.”

It sounds like a promise, like a threat. Luke swallows, and does not reply as Hondo’s ship lurches into hyperspace in pursuit of his sister.

Leia wakes. It’s their first night in hyperspace, and the motion of the ship is familiar enough to lull her to sleep, but she’d woken anyway. She sits up, slides down the bed, and climbs down from the top bunk. With Barriss now with them, Ahsoka had asked Leia to take Jyn’s old bed, and Barriss and Ahsoka now share the bottom bunk. 

She stands for a moment over Ahsoka, but a moment is all she has. Despite her silence, Ahsoka blinks abruptly awake, and finds Leia’s gaze immediately. 

“Leia,” she whispers, “what’s wrong?”

And all at once, Leia knows what had woken her.

“Many are coming,” she says, “with things to teach me.”

“What does that mean?” asks Barriss sleepily. 

But Ahsoka has gone still, her eyes flickering away from Leia’s and back again. “You’ve said so before,” she says, and levers herself into sitting. “When I told you Barriss would meet us at Bespin. You said you’d known that she’d come.”

“Yes,” Leia says, relieved to be so understood. 

Now Barriss, too, is upright, all her weight leaned on her one arm. “Leia,” she says, “what do you mean? Who else is coming?”

All her relief vanishes, like oxygen sucked out of an open airlock in deep space. She kneels before Ahsoka. “You told me to tell you,” she beseeches, and feels childish and stupid in doing so. _Don’t be angry_ , is what she means, but saying that would feel even stupider.

Ahsoka takes her hands in her own and holds tight. “Who else is coming, Leia?”

She can’t look away. Even in the dark, Ahsoka’s eyes are so blue. “Asajj Ventress,” she says, “and my brother, and my father.”

Ahsoka stands so quickly she nearly bangs her head against the frame of the top bunk. Swearing under her breath, she goes to the door and through it, all before Leia’s summoned the grace to stand herself, and Barriss has shifted from under the covers. 

Leia makes to run after her, but Barriss catches her hand.

“So,” she says softly, that one arm so very strong, “I have come with things to teach you, have I?”

Leia swallows, and nods. 

Barriss’ hand tightens infinitesimally around her wrist. Not enough to hurt, but enough to reinforce her next words.

“We will discuss this further, Leia,” she warns. “I am…not pleased you kept this from me.”

“Yes, Auntie,” Leia whispers.

Barriss releases her wrist. “Go on, then,” she says, nodding to the door, and Leia scrambles to her feet and goes. 

Ahsoka is in the cockpit with a sleep-tousled Han, gesturing to the navcomputer and to Artoo. “—must at least acknowledge the possibility,” she’s saying, “that they managed to put a tracker on us.”

But Han’s shaking his head. “I trust Lando,” he insists. “And Lando wouldn’t let anyone get near this ship unless he specifically approved them.”

“Lando did well by us,” Ahsoka agrees, “but you are a fool if your trust in him extends to every being under his command. Especially when he was not in a position to directly oversee all of them at all times.”

Han is silent. 

“There is a tracking device on this ship,” Ahsoka says, more gently. “How it got here is of little concern to us. The fact that it is here at all is the problem.”

“So what do you want to do? Drop out of hyperspace and do a spacewalk?”

“It’s too dangerous to do so in deep space,” Ahsoka says, “which you well know. If they were able to jump to us before we located the device—”

“What I’m saying is that they couldn’t,” Han interrupts. “Tracking beacons don’t transmit in hyperspace. We move too quick for them. They’d have to be out of hyperspace when we dropped and get here before we jumped again. The odds of that happening—”

Artoo whistles the odds of that happening. They are astronomically low. 

“Exactly,” Han says, pointing at Artoo. “So we drop, we spacewalk, we find the tracker and destroy it.”

Ahsoka is quiet for a long moment. “Any chance is too great when—when Vader is involved,” she says at last. 

“Vader?” Han asks very quietly.

“My father,” Leia says, and they both look up at her. She’s startled them; they hadn’t noticed her. 

“Darth Vader,” Han says slowly, “the Emperor’s Fist, is your father.” He shakes his head, then throws it back in an hysteric laugh. “Stars, kid, I knew he had to be somebody shady to keep you on the run for so long, but Vader—?!”

He laughs again, still hysteric, for a long moment. Ahsoka looks from him to Leia, her expression carefully blank, her presence in the Force carefully contained. 

Sobering, Han sags down into the pilot’s seat. “So Darth Vader is your father,” he says, suddenly quite calm. “So we can’t take any chances. I assume this is what you were getting at, Ahsoka.”

“It’s better,” Ahsoka says slowly, “if we anticipate a confrontation on Thape than if we risk one in deep space. At least there, Leia can run.”

_I won’t_ , Leia opens her mouth to say, but Ahsoka shoots her a quelling look, and in the end, she says nothing. 

Han nods, then sighs. “You know, this could’ve waited ‘til morning,” he says. “I’m going back to bed.”

“Alright,” Ahsoka says softly. “So will we.”

But Leia can’t sleep. 

She lies on the top bunk, blankets pooled around her hips, staring up into the dark, so thick here that she almost can’t see the ceiling. It reminds her of another dark, one shot through with starlight and radiant nebulas, an oasis she’d once shared.

She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and goes there now.

The Duinuogwuin is waiting for her. Impossibly tall, incomprehensibly long, its coils surround the oasis at the point of the horizon. It defines the limits of what she can see. 

_Hello, little dragon_ , it rumbles, bringing its great head down to look at her.

“Hello,” Leia says. She reaches out with her star-marked arm and lays her scarred hand upon its nose. Those huge eyes slide half-shut, but no breath gusts out to bowl her over.

_Many are coming_ , the dragon says, _with things to teach you._

“I know,” Leia says, and frowns. “I don’t know what I need to learn.”

_That is an important task_ , the dragon agrees. _But it is not the first._

Her frown deepens. She recalls her hand to her side. “What is the first?”

_To accept the wisdom of your teachers._

With effort, Leia keeps her hands loose and still at her sides. “One of those coming,” she says coldly, “is the man I might have called ‘father.’ I do not accept that he has anything to teach me.”

_Not even to escape his errors?_ The dragon blinks languorously at her, untroubled by her vehemence.

“I know his errors,” Leia says. “He trusted where he should not have done, and loved selfishly. Perhaps he did not understand the consequences of his actions. This does not absolve him.”

_Those are another’s words_ , the dragon observes. _What are your own?_

“They’re my mother’s words,” Leia says, and sinks to her knees, anchored there by a sense of loss so strong it overwhelms her. “My mothers, whom I have not seen in years because of him. They’re the words my mother gave my brother, whom I have not seen in years because of him. If that were the extent of his crimes, wouldn’t it be enough?”

The dragon says nothing, but waits, patiently. 

“But that’s not the extent of his crimes,” Leia says, uneven. “You must know this. He slaughtered younglings. He betrayed his friends, his family. He gave rise to a war that has torn the Galaxy in two since my birth. He has committed atrocities—” Her voice fails her. 

_You are angry with him_ , the dragon says quietly.

She heaves herself upright, no longer able to sit still. “I’m furious with him,” she says coldly, “with them both.”

_Anger_ , the dragon says, _is predicated upon love._

Leia shakes her head, quick and sharp. “I don’t love him,” she says.

_Your love need not be for him, for your anger to be directed at him._

She considers that for a long moment. “You speak as though anger can be a positive force.” Yoda’s words echo in the space of her mind: _the path to the Dark Side, that is._

_That, too, you must learn_ , says the Duinuogwuin. 

Leia sighs, and sits again, crossing her legs before her. “What can he possibly teach me? Why shouldn’t I try to, to defeat him? Wouldn’t we all be better off if he were dead?”

_He can teach you,_ says the dragon, _how to survive the master._

She glances at the silver dragon through slitted eyes. “I thought I’d learned that lesson already. And I thought you’d said that the dragon has no master.”

_The dragon has no master_ , the dragon agrees. _Why, little dragon, do you think that is?_

Leia opens her mouth, and closes it again. She hadn’t thought of causation, had only accepted the dragon at its word. She searches the silence for long minutes for an answer, and doesn’t realize she’s found one until she’s started speaking. 

She looks the dragon in its great dark eye. “Because your forebears killed the master,” she says.

_Yes,_ the dragon sighs. _Nothing is free, little dragon. Not even freedom._

“I will be free,” Leia says with conviction. “And so will the Galaxy.”

_But at what cost?_

She thinks of the Emperor, whose wrinkled face she’s only seen in holograms. “The death of the master.”

The dragon blinks slowly at her. _You have something to learn after all_ , it says: _how to kill the master._

Barriss is waiting for her when Leia wakes in the morning, their room dimly lit to simulate daybreak. Ahsoka is gone, presumably to strategize their landing and probable confrontation on Thape; Barriss alone has lingered, sitting against the wall, her one hand weaving through the air as she directs two knitting needles with the Force. As always, her control renders Leia speechless with awe and a determination to measure up to her aunt’s exacting standard. 

Leia sits up, and climbs down the bunk. Barriss nods at her civilly, but otherwise does not move from her knitting, so Leia pulls out some clothes from the drawers built under the beds, and retreats to the ’fresher to clean herself and change. When at last she emerges, warm in blue wool trousers and tunic, Barriss is still there, though her knitting has disappeared. Leia goes to her, and sits opposite, leaning against the bunk beds. 

Barriss opens her eyes, bluer than anything Leia has ever seen, and says, “So what is it you wish to learn, Leia?”

Leia opens her mouth and closes it again. _How to kill the master_ is all well and good, but it’s hardly something she can say to Auntie B. 

Or is it?

She looks down, picks at a loose thread at the seam over her thigh. She waits for the words to come to her, and Barriss waits, too. 

She says, “Why did you hurt Ahsoka, all those years ago?”

It’s the only context she has for her mother’s constrained disapproval of Barriss: that she had hurt Ahsoka once, before the fall of the Republic: that she had done something Mom had not yet forgiven, even if Ahsoka had.

Barriss blinks slowly at her, her face too still to be anything but a non-expression of surprise. But she doesn’t dismiss Leia’s question or leave the room. Her hand twitches in her lap, but otherwise she is motionless.

“You’re nearly fourteen,” Barriss says quietly. “I suppose you were bound to ask eventually.” She looks down at her hand for a long moment, and then begins to tell the story. 

It’s…awful. Whatever Leia had expected, the truth is so much worse. The Jedi at war, despite their oaths and their creed; Barriss, convinced she could make them see reason, and failing, and failing, and failing, until she fell to violence, the last resort. How she did not expect to evade suspicion at all, let alone as long as she had; how she framed Ahsoka for the crime she’d committed out of panic; how she’d been caught and forced to confess at the eleventh hour and been imprisoned, until the Republic fell and Ahsoka came to free her. 

Barriss spares no detail, spares herself not at all. Her voice throughout is unfeeling, uncompromising, merciless. Leia has asked, so Barriss gives her the truth in its entirety. 

When she finishes, Leia can’t look at her, can’t look anywhere else, either. She stares at the dark tattoos on Barriss’ cheek. “But,” she says, almost desperately, “you came back.” To the Light, is what she means, but somehow saying that would be too cruel. 

A smile ghosts across Barriss’ mouth. “Not all of me.”

Leia, involuntarily, glances at her empty sleeve, pinned neatly to her shoulder. 

“Not even that is all I lost,” Barriss says. “I lost a part of myself I can never recover. For the rest of my life, I am someone who has committed an atrocity and hurt the one I love best. Chains like that cannot be escaped. Nor should they be.”

“But Ahsoka forgave you,” Leia says.

“Which is the only reason I am here at all, and not rotting in an Imperial cell or dead at Alliance or Imperial hands,” Barriss says. “Your mother, as I’m sure you know, is less inclined to forgive.”

Leia does know. Doubt gnaws at her, all her certainty before the Duinuogwuin vanished.

“Did—” She hesitates. Does she really want to know? “Did you use the Dark Side?”

Barriss looks at her without expression. Those blue eyes seem dulled, though perhaps that’s just an effect of the brightening lights. 

“Of course I did,” she says.

Leia gasps at this, nearly a sob, to match the tears springing to her eyes. She scrambles to her feet and flees. 

She finds Ahsoka in the _Falcon_ ’s main room with Artoo, Artoo projecting maps of Thape over the dejarik table while Ahsoka makes notes on her datapad. Ahsoka looks up as Leia enters, and immediately sets the datapad down. 

“Oh, Leia,” she says, with ruinous compassion, and shifts over on the bench, leaving space for Leia to shuffle in next to her. “What’s wrong?”

Leia rubs furiously at her eyes. _Everything_ , she wants to say, but doesn’t. How to communicate how Barriss’ revelation has so disturbed the foundations of Leia’s sense of justice, of morality? How to express the new instability of her worldview? 

Leia says, “Barriss told me about the Temple bombing.”

“Ah,” says Ahsoka softly. “Yes. I understand how you would find it upsetting.”

Leia jerks next to her, looks her right in the eye. “How do you not?”

“I did.” Ahsoka leans back against the bench’s backrest and stares contemplatively through the blue hologram of Thape. “For a long time…I was so angry with her. With the Council, too. Mace can tell you that.”

“But you forgave her,” Leia says. She can not reconcile Ahsoka’s anger with her forgiveness. She cannot reconcile her own anger with any potentiality of forgiveness, either. 

“I did,” Ahsoka says, and adds simply: “I love her.”

“Did you forgive her because you love her?” She needs to know this more than almost anything.

“Hm,” says Ahsoka, taking the time to think about it, just as she had when Leia and Luke had asked her about their father, in those wonderful, starry years before Luke was taken from them. Now, as then, Leia feels her heart swell with love for Ahsoka, for devotion to her. Ahsoka has never treated Leia or her brother as anything but an equal, no matter how small they were, no matter how painful the question. She has always answered honestly, completely. Just as Barriss had answered honestly and completely when Leia had asked her about her past. That wave of love turns confused, painful. Her mouth is full with bitterness. 

“I had loved her,” Ahsoka says eventually, choosing each word with care, “long before I knew what it meant to love another. And I trusted her, too, before she broke that trust. But even then, I still loved her. She could not have hurt me so badly if I didn’t.” She finally meets Leia’s eyes again, thoughtful. “I would have loved her whether or not I forgave her, whether or not she accepted that forgiveness. The two are independent of each other. They have no bearing on each other. I forgave her because I needed to forgive, and because she needed to be forgiven. Because it was the only way forward for us. Because I understood why she had done what she had done, even if I disagreed with it.” She sighs. “You can forgive all sorts of terrible things if you understand why they were done.”

Dread clutches at Leia’s heart, her ribs, with long cold fingers. “Do you think,” she manages after a moment, “that’s why Luke freed him?”

“Anakin?” Ahsoka frowns. “Maybe—but I don’t know, Leia. We don’t know anything about what’s happened to Luke in the past years except to know that he wasn’t physically harmed. And what Luke has said. But his freeing Anakin throws his account into question. We don’t know whose side he’s on.”

But Leia thinks of Luke, curled around her in the dark; Luke, practicing Bocce and Bothan to trick Mom into thinking that they were both up, so that Leia could sneak another minute of half-sleep. Luke, sundering their bond on that dusty day on Cyphar, ripping them apart so Anakin could never find her through Luke. 

Luke, in their oasis, the first time she’s seen him there in years, terror and hope warring on his face as he steps closer and closer and she can only hurl recriminations.

“He’s my brother,” Leia says quietly. “My twin. He’s part of me.” She shakes her head. She has nothing but faith to support this, and yet, she has enough of that faith to support this. “He won’t ever betray me. And I won’t ever betray him.”

“He might not think he’s betraying you,” Ahsoka says, those awful words made gentle in her voice. “And that’s not a risk I’m willing to take, Leia.”

They’re silent for a long moment.

“Can I tell you a secret?” Ahsoka asks. Leia nods. “I don’t know what I’ll do when I see Anakin.”

Leia sags into the bench. She can’t have this conversation. She must. “You forgave Barriss,” she points out. 

“What Barriss did was awful,” Ahsoka agrees. “What Anakin has done is worse.”

And Leia takes a deep breath and allows herself to count out the atrocities committed by her father. The enslavement of the Wookiees. The extermination of the Lasat. The invasion and occupation of countless worlds. Innumerable executions, untold tortures. The genocide of the Jedi, starting with their children, their future.

“It seems impossible,” Leia murmurs, “that he could be forgiven.”

But the dragon’s voice echoes in her ear: _We are impossible things, little dragon. It is up to us to accomplish the impossible._

“ _I_ don’t want to forgive him,” she adds, and Ahsoka slides her arm over Leia’s shoulders. 

“I know,” Ahsoka says. She sounds so sad. Like Mom had, when she and Luke had first asked about Anakin. 

Ahsoka says, “For so long, I held onto hope for Anakin. Despite everything. Despite _everything_ ,” and Leia knows Ahsoka is enumerating atrocities too. “And then he took Luke, and he became such a real danger to you both, and I felt I could not even hope for him. But now, I wonder if that was cowardice. If I should have held onto my hope. If that wasn’t the braver thing to do. I don’t know what I’ll do when I see him again.”

“Me neither,” Leia says, meaning someone else entirely. 

Ahsoka squeezes her shoulder. “You won’t see him on Thape,” she says. “Either of them. I’ll hold them off. Barriss will take you, Han, and Chewbacca somewhere safe, and I’ll rejoin you when I can.”

Leia thinks of Barriss’ dulled blue eyes and her mouth goes sour. “But—”

“It is not your place,” Ahsoka says, gentle but implacable, “to forgive Barriss. That is not something you can offer her, and it is not something she could ask of you. All you have to do is _trust her_. She is the same being you’ve known your whole life, Leia. She wants you safe. You can trust her to keep you safe.”

Leia blinks rapidly at this, but shudders, and nods. Ahsoka is right. She can trust Barriss to keep her safe.

She blinks again. An idea arrives to her like starlight, distant but impossibly bright. She waits for it to coalesce.

Oh, she—she can trust Barriss for something else, too. 

Leia swallows down the idea instead of speaking it aloud. “I know, Socks,” she says, and Ahsoka squeezes her shoulder again, and holds her quietly.

They’ve been dropping from hyperspace every twelve hours, waiting for the tracking beacon to transmit its signal. Anakin grows less patient with each drop. “The longer it takes for the signal to transmit,” he tells Luke darkly, “the greater the chance that they’ll have discovered it.”

“But if they’re in hyperspace, too—”

Anakin shakes his head. “We might have missed the transmission.” He frowns at the star-charts. 

Luke frowns at the star-charts, too. _Search your feelings_ , he imagines Obi-Wan saying, or hears him saying. He can’t say as much to Anakin. It’s too dangerous. He searches his own feelings instead.

When he opens his eyes, Anakin is watching him, impatience replaced with curiosity. “What do you sense, Luke?”

He senses incomprehensible speed, the blue-white blur of hyperspace, an impending destination. He looks at Anakin. “We need to drop from hyperspace, _now.”_

“Strap in,” Anakin orders, and takes the controls. The second they drop from hyperspace, the beacon lights up.

Anakin stares at the heading, his frown growing only deeper. “Thape,” he says, almost to himself. “Why would they go to Thape?”

Luke peers at the cosmograph. Thape seems well within the parameters he and Anakin had anticipated: obscure, Mid Rim. “Why wouldn’t they go to Thape?”

“There’s an Imperial garrison there,” Anakin says curtly, plugging coordinates into the navcomputer. “Has been since the Republic fell. They risk detection going there—but then, so do we.” He finishes entering the coordinates and shouts for the others to brace for hyperspace, giving only a second’s warning before the ship jumps. 

“They know,” Anakin says, as space blurs blue before them. The bottom of Luke’s stomach drops like a stone. “They know we’re tracking them. Either that, or—”

But he falls silent, and stormy. 

Luke waits a moment. “Or what?”

Anakin stirs. “Nothing. Old Jedi nonsense.” His face remains troubled.

Luke waits again, but no more information is forthcoming. He says, “What are you going to do when we find them?”

Anakin does not look at him. “We’ll get her back,” he says. “Don’t worry.”

The answer is so inadequate that Luke falls speechless for a moment. “We’re not going to ‘get her back,’” he manages. 

“Not with that attitude,” Anakin mutters.

“We never had Leia in the first place,” Luke says, desperately. “She won’t come willingly. She doesn’t want anything to do with us.”

“She’s your _sister_ ,” Anakin says, as though that is all the incentive they need offer her.

“I haven’t seen her in almost four years!” Luke cries. “She might not recognize me. I might not recognize her.”

“You’ll know each other,” Anakin says with entirely misplaced confidence.

Luke gropes around him for anything that might break through Anakin’s denial. “Ahsoka,” he says, and Anakin stills. “Ahsoka won’t let you take her.”

Anakin is quiet for a long moment. “No,” he agrees, “she won’t. But I trained Ahsoka. There is nothing she can do that would surprise me.”

“It’s been years,” Luke whispers. “You might not know her as well as you think you do.” For her sake, and Leia’s, he hopes this is true. 

“People don’t change,” Anakin says. “Not really. Not at their core.”

Luke looks at him. “Did you?”

“That,” says Anakin, “depends on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

Finally, Anakin turns, meets his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he says slowly, and he seems suddenly uncertain, and vulnerable in that uncertainty. “I think I’m who I’ve always been.” Then he shrugs, equanimity restored. “I did terrible things for the Jedi, and for the Empire, and for myself. Maybe that’s just who I am: someone who does terrible things.”

Luke swallows. “I don’t accept that.”

“I think,” Anakin says, gently wry, “that says more about you than about me.”

Ignoring that, Luke says, “I think you’ve been doing terrible things for so long that you think you don’t know how to do anything else. But it’s not true. You’ve been kind to me. You treated Bo, and Appo and Fox, with respect. Uncle Rex said you were a brother in all but name. And Mom—Mom said that you were brave and noble. Socks never stopped believing there was good in you. And I’ve seen that in you. When you left the Death Star with me. When you told me to forget about you, down in the Palace’s cells. When you promised Mom to take care of me.” He takes a breath. “You can be good, if you want to be. You just have to make that choice.”

Anakin is silent. Long moments stretch out like starlight in the second before a jump to hyperspace. Then: “Socks?”

Luke startles. “I— _we_ had trouble with Ahsoka’s name when we were little,” he mumbles. 

“I called her ‘Snips,’” Anakin says, staring into hyperspace. A half-smile twitches in the corner of his mouth. “And she called me ‘Skyguy.’” He falls silent again for a long moment, and Luke does not dare speak. To do so would fracture something too delicate for speech. 

“Padmé,” Anakin says quietly. “And Obi-Wan. And Ahsoka. And Rex. Who else from my old life was in yours, Luke?”

Keeping this secret is so ingrained in his habits that for a moment, Luke can only watch, warily, the blankness of his father’s face. But Anakin has left the Empire, for _him_. If that does not incur Luke’s trust, he doesn’t know what would. “Captain Cody,” he says at last, “Master Yoda. Luminara and Auntie Ti. Mace. All the Aunties—Mom’s handmaidens,” he clarifies, when Anakin looks at him questioningly. “Auntie Barriss.”

Anakin flinches at the last name. His eyes burn gold for a terrible eternity; and then the yellow recedes, leaving only blue in its wake. “All my old friends,” he says, soft and deadly, “and some old enemies, allied against me all these years with what should have been mine all along.”

Luke says, quiet, “You can’t own a person.” And Anakin flinches again, lips twisting in a snarl, the way a cornered animal snarls when it has no other recourse. And Luke says, something pitiless in him outing itself, “Not even if you love them.”

Anakin says nothing, but his face bears the words like a wound. 

Eventually, Luke ventures, “Didn’t you ever wonder if you were on the wrong side of it? You must have known…” He doesn’t know how to finish the sentence.

“I swore myself to the Emperor to save your mother’s life,” Anakin says quietly. “She lived. It couldn’t be wrong. Even if she hated me, even if she undid every sacrifice I made for her, at least she was alive.” He shudders. “I couldn’t save my mother. But I could save her.”

Here at last is the answer to the riddle of Darth Vader, the man who did wrong things despite knowing they were wrong, despite hating that they were wrong, who eked out an existence from hatred of himself and everything around him. Sworn to the Light, he gave himself over to the Dark. Trained to protect, he slaughtered millions. A slave himself, he enslaved millions more. And he did it all for love. 

It’s sick, Luke thinks. It’s sick that one man’s selfish love could wreak so much suffering. That he could deem all that suffering bearable, if only because the woman he loved still lived. 

Instead, he says, “You put yourself first.”

Anakin snaps around, incredulous. “I saved her life,” he says. “I sacrificed _everything_ to keep her alive.”

“You needed her alive more than you needed freedom,” Luke agrees, remembering Mom’s words, so long ago. “You never considered she might not feel the same way.”

“I knew she didn’t feel the same way,” Anakin snaps.

“That’s worse,” Luke says. “You discarded her feelings to protect yourself. You denied her agency. You helped destroy everything she’d built to save something she would have given freely. You put yourself first.”

Anakin is silent.

Luke says, “You can’t do that with Leia. I won’t let you.”

“You think you could stop me?” Anakin asks, but there’s a smile playing on his face, in the corner of his eyes. 

“I will always put Leia first,” Luke says sharply. “Always. And if—if you really want to be better, if you really care about me—you’ll do the same.”

“What does that mean to you, Luke?” Anakin says curiously. “Putting her first.”

“I gave the only thing I had to give so that she could stay with our mothers.”

“Yourself,” Anakin realizes. “But you’re bringing me to her.” He smiles, small, like Grandmother Shmi in Luke’s visions of her. “You’re a hypocrite, Luke.”

His heart thuds in his chest. “Only if you make me one.”

Anakin cants his head, curious again. 

“When we find them,” Luke says, “on Thape or wherever—you won’t raise a hand to Leia or Ahsoka or whoever else is with them. You will approach them only on their terms. If Leia wants nothing to do with you, you will leave her be.”

“I’m her father,” Anakin says lowly. 

“She’s your daughter,” Luke corrects. “It’s not about you. It’s about what she needs.”

Anakin thunks his head gently back against the headrest. “For Leia, then,” he says, something inscrutably bleak and hollow in his voice. 

Luke refuses to dwell on it. “For Leia.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw references: Anakin attempts to murder Asajj Ventress with a Force-choke. Luke and Hondo intervene, and Asajj is not seriously hurt. 
> 
> in other news: I ADORE y'all for leaving me comments telling me what you enjoy about the fic, or that you're rereading it!!!! I know I owe like. 70 replies (I'm sorry!!!!) but thank you a million times for taking a moment to let me know what you're thinking, I appreciate you all so much. 
> 
> chapter seven is complete and will be posted March 1. I am working on ch8 right now.


	7. seven: thape

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Thape looms before them, all grey-green forests and golden plains and swathes of silvery desert. It’s one of the smaller planets Luke has seen; certainly, in comparison to Bespin, it’s tiny. But it’s foreboding all the same, in a way that feels deeply incongruous with its size and appearance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> well, a lot of you have been waiting for this chapter for a LONG TIME. I only hope it lives up to your hopes and expectations.

They make Thape on the third day, and Artoo provides coordinates that take them to a secluded forest at dusk. The _Falcon_ settles with surprising delicacy into a clearing, and Han and Chewbacca lower the boarding ramp, letting in a gust of fresh air. Ahsoka and Chewbacca go to scout the perimeter, Han grumbles but goes to fetch firewood, and Barriss—Barriss stays to guard Leia. 

The idea that she needs to be guarded is absurd, and profoundly irritating. Most days, she and Ahsoka fight to a standstill. Leia is fully capable of holding her own, and she chafes at the suggestion that she might not be. 

But she’s needed a moment to talk to Barriss, uninterrupted, and this nonsense about keeping guard provides good cover for that. Leia bites the inside of her cheek, and ducks into the mess, where Barriss is organizing meal packs into a sack to carry outside. 

“Can I help?” Leia asks.

Barriss slants a glance her way. “I can manage,” she says, voice perfectly calm.

“I know,” Leia says. She swallows. “I want to help.”

Barriss turns, evaluates her for a moment. “You can carry the bowls,” she says eventually. 

Leia has to stand on tiptoes to reach them, but she reaches them, and gathers them to her chest. She follows Barriss out into the clearing in silence.

Outside, the air stirs with a light breeze, smells faintly of wild herbs and sweetgrass crushed underfoot. Snatches of birdsong and the distant hum of insects echo around the clearing. After so long in hyperspace, only the _Falcon_ ’s ambient noise and filtered air, the outdoors are almost overwhelming. Barriss sets the bag of ration packs on the ground and begins to gather stones to circle around a fire. 

Leia bends to help her, feeling for sedimented rock in the cold dirt, using the Force to prize it out of the ground. She says, raising her voice enough to carry to Barriss, “I owe you an apology.”

Barriss doesn’t look up. “You were upset. I understand.”

“That’s not an excuse,” Leia says. She swallows, presses the tip of her tongue to the back of her teeth. “I asked for your honesty, and didn’t bear it. I should have tried harder. I shouldn’t have run. I’m sorry, Barriss.”

Barriss straightens and sighs. “It’s kind of you to apologize. But as I said, it’s unnecessary.”

“It’s necessary to _me_ ,” Leia says, sharp. Then she subsides. “You don’t have to forgive me. I just wanted you to know.”

“Forgive— _of course_ I forgive you,” Barriss says, turning to face Leia. “I forgave you even as you ran from my past. How could I not? I spent long enough trying to flagellate my past into not existing. I would be a hypocrite if I blamed you for only trying to escape it. But, Leia, my crimes are not yours to bear. They are mine. I have learned to live with them. You can trust me to carry them still.”

“I know,” says Leia. She pulls a stone free with a burst of earth, and wrinkles her nose when some scatters across her face and hands. “I actually wanted to talk to you about that.”

“About what?” Barriss asks warily. 

Leia wipes delicately at her face, rubbing the dirt off of the star-scar on her cheek. She tosses the stone toward the fire site. She says, slowly, “Many are coming with things to teach me.”

“You’ve said.” Barriss watches her narrowly. “Me. Ventress. Your father, your brother.”

“I underwent a trial.” Leia touches the saber and its many-colored crystal, hanging at her hip. “Auntie—I saw things. Visions.”

Barriss frowns at her, nothing dubious in the expression. She sits, and pats the ground beside her. “Tell me.”

So Leia does: the cave, Grandmother Shmi, the Duinuogwuin. The lessons, sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, that each imparted. The cave: how to be still, how to sacrifice, how to be alone. Shmi: what it means to be a slave, that no thing is free, how to survive the master. The Duinuogwuin: to be impossible. 

The dragon that waits for her when she closes her eyes. _How to kill the master_ she leaves unsaid. It feels too dangerous to articulate outside of the dragon’s aegis. Equally unsaid are the three figures who had appeared to her in the second vision, speaking of sacrifice, balance, power, hope. 

“And now many are coming, with things to teach you,” Barriss says slowly. “What more do you have to learn?”

Leia takes a deep breath. “I think,” she says, “I have to learn the ways of the Force.”

“You are already quite proficient,” Barriss says.

“No. _All_ the ways of the Force.”

Barriss goes completely still. “You wish to learn…from me, from Ventress, and from your father…how to navigate the Dark.”

“I don’t want to learn,” Leia says. “But I think I need to.” Shmi’s words return to her now: _you are the last chance for any future_. She shivers, and waits. 

Barriss rises abruptly. She lifts her hand between them, forestalling anything else Leia might say. “I need to think,” she says. “Keep gathering stones. Han will be back soon.”

Leia rises, brushing dirt and grass from her pants, and levitates a few stones over to the fire site. With these, they have enough for a circle almost a meter in diameter. She’s about to leave it at that when Artoo rolls down the gangplank and beeps urgently about fire safety, so, following his orders, she uses the Force like a shovel, scraping away the sweetgrass and fallen leaves within the circle, and then for a few meters around it for good measure. 

By the time she’s finished, Han is coming back, some sticks in his arms, leaves in his hair, and a smudge of dirt on his cheek. “I don’t get,” he complains, “why _I_ was the one sent to gather firewood, given that I don’t have Wookiee strength or lightsabers.”

“It’s very unfair,” Leia agrees, straight-faced. “Your life must be so hard.”

Han points at her. “It is, and don’t think I didn’t notice that sarcasm, princess.” He looks around. “Where’s Barriss?”

“Inside.”

“Isn’t she supposed to be guarding you?”

“I can take care of myself,” Leia says, unable to quite keep the irritation out of her voice. 

Han softens a little. “No one’s doubting that—I’ve seen you fight, remember? But you don’t have to take care of yourself. You’ve got all of us. None of us would want you to take Vader on alone.”

 _You are never alone_ , the Duinuogwuin had told her, just after she’d reached into the heart of a dying star and extracted her kyber crystal. How true it feels, if occasionally suffocating. How true, especially now. 

Han dumps the bundle of firewood next to the stone circle. “Anyways. Why is Barriss inside when she’s supposed to be out here?”

Leia can’t quite meet his eyes. “I—we argued.”

“Again?”

Her cheeks heat. Han sighs. 

“Kid,” he says, “you’ve gotta stop that.”

“I know,” she mumbles.

“She’s going to be responsible for you,” Han continues. “More than she has been. You gotta be careful with people in those situations.”

Leia snaps her head up. “She’d never—”

Han shrugs. “Doesn’t mean you should push it.”

She looks at him, knelt down, arranging the wood in the stone circle with a dubious look on his face. Her heart aches for him. Where had he learned that lesson? Who had he been meant to count on, only to have that trust betrayed?

Leia crouches down next to him. “You can count on me,” she says.

“I know,” Han says, distractedly. She puts her hand on his arm.

“No,” she says, “I mean, you can trust me. Not to leave you behind. To look after you. Just like I trust you.”

Han studies her for a long moment. “I know, princess,” he says, uncharacteristically gentle. “I know.” 

She flushes again, and says, “Artoo knows how to build campfires.”

“Of course he does,” Han says. “Artoo!”

Artoo, who has been watching over them from the boarding ramp, whistles affirmatively and zooms down the ramp and across the grass with only minor difficulty owing to the leaves of sweetgrass that get caught in his arms. He beeps instructions that Leia translates, and Han arranges the firewood accordingly. When they’re done, and Artoo whistles his approval, Han lights the tinder, and by the time Ahsoka and Chewbacca return, the fire is blazing merrily, sparks igniting and extinguishing in the night air, as Barriss heats the rations in a pot suspended over it. 

They eat quietly as Ahsoka and Chewbacca detail their findings. 

“Forest,” Ahsoka says, “all around us, all the way to the mountains. No sign of it stopping there—we’re in the middle of a continental forest, from what we saw on our descent. Terrain appears solid and easy; I don’t anticipate any wildlife causing you trouble as you make your way west.”

“What’s west?” Leia asks.

Ahsoka chews on a chunk of meat. “The Naboo have an Alliance outpost on Thape,” she says once she’s swallowed, “about three days’ march from here. We’ll use the _Falcon_ as bait—let them think there are more of us inside, let the tracking beacon lead them here—while you all make for the Alliance. They’re in the foothills of the first mountain range you’ll come across. Now, we’ve got to be careful: there’s an Imperial garrison to the north, and while we don’t think they know about the Alliance outpost, we can’t discount the possibility.”

“I don’t like it,” Leia says.

“This is war,” Ahsoka says, not unkindly. “We must all do things we don’t like.”

“I don’t like it, either,” Han announces. “Why do we have to leave the _Falcon_ here? Why can’t we take the beacon off and run now?”

“Because,” Ahsoka says implacably, “if we run, he won’t stop chasing us.” A beat, and her next words hang over them like a bomb about to burst. “I’m going to make sure he never chases us again. And when I’m done, I’ll take the _Falcon_ and join with you at the outpost.”

“The _Falcon_ needs a copilot,” Han says coolly. “How are you going to fly her?”

Ahsoka does not even hesitate. “Artoo will stay with me. He can’t make the march with you, anyway.”

Artoo beeps indignantly at that, shuffling on his arms, before subsiding with a long, low whistle of concession. 

“It’s settled, then,” Ahsoka says. “You’ll leave at daybreak.”

Leia has to force herself to finish her rations. But she doesn’t taste a single bite.

She wakes, later, just enough to hear Ahsoka and Han arguing outside their cabin door. 

“Just how sure are you that you can win this?” Han asks, low and urgent and carrying through the closed door. “Because I don’t relish the idea of losing my ship— _my_ ship!—to the Emperor’s Fist.”

“He won’t kill me,” Ahsoka says.

“You’re betting an awful lot on the mercy of a mass murderer.”

“That’s not what I’m betting on,” Ahsoka says. “But I promise you, Han: I will see your ship back to you.”

Then Barriss murmurs, “Go back to sleep, Leia,” so Leia closes her eyes.

The next thing she knows, it’s still dark, and Ahsoka is shaking her awake. 

“Time to get up, Leia,” she whispers.

Leia clambers down from her bunk: possibly the last time she’ll ever do so. She cleans herself in the ’fresher, and dresses in comfortable training clothes, a thick wool sweater pulled on top. Her hair she braids in a crown encircling her head. The star-scar shines bright on her cheek, and her hands—one pale, one white with scar tissue—pull on her boots and tie them tightly. She opens the medicine cabinet, to check for anything she might have forgotten, and finds an old tin of red cosmetic paste, the kind Mama used to paint the scar of remembrance on her lip and Luke’s. She tucks it in her pocket; perhaps it will help her settle in with the Nubians at this Alliance outpost. 

Her rucksack is sitting at the foot of the bed. Her travel case will stay here, too cumbersome to be wheeled or carried for three days. Inside the rucksack is a change of clothes, some soap in a cloth sudsing bag, and her datapad and its charger. She picks up the rucksack and, maybe for the last time, leaves the bedroom. 

Barriss is in the mess with her own rucksack; she stops Leia on her way past and hands her twelve ration packs. 

Leia takes them and starts layering them into her bag. “I thought it was a three-day march,” she says.

“If all goes well, it should be,” Barriss says. “But only fools plan only for everything to go well.”

Leia finishes putting the packs in her bag. “We are not fools,” she says.

Barriss slants a half-smile at her. “No,” she agrees, “we are not.”

Leia smiles back at her, and leaves the mess. 

Ahsoka and Artoo are in the main room again, Artoo projecting maps of Thape much as he had been when Leia had last come here in search of them, much as they’ve been arranged how many countless days over the four years Leia has lived on board the _Millennium Falcon_. It hurts, looking at them. Remembering them in advance. It’s like watching a wound be inflicted and doing nothing to stop it, like meaning to do nothing to stop it. But she can’t help herself, can’t stop watching them, memorizing every detail of dear Artoo and beloved Ahsoka, her heart breaking even before she’s left them, before she’s made them leave her.

Maybe that hurts worst of all: that this is her fault. Perhaps Ahsoka would have chosen to confront Anakin or Vader anyway, but now, she’s doing it for Leia, without an alternative. 

If Ahsoka dies, it will be Leia’s fault.

Ahsoka looks up. “Leia,” she says, so much warmth imbued in that one word. “Come here.” And Leia drops her rucksack by the doorway and goes quickly to her open arms, nestling herself within their embrace as though she weren’t getting too big to fit there comfortably. Ahsoka holds her, those strong hands rubbing up her back, Leia’s face pressed gently against Ahsoka’s lekku, long enough that Leia can almost pretend her heart is not breaking at this goodbye, out of all of them. Luke, her mothers, Jyn, and now Ahsoka: what is family but those whose leaving breaks you?

“It will be alright, Leia,” Ahsoka murmurs, and Leia shudders.

“I don’t want you to die,” she says, muffled by the cloth of Ahsoka’s tabard. 

“He won’t kill me,” Ahsoka says, with insane confidence. “I don’t believe him to be capable of it.”

But Leia thinks of the murdered Jedi younglings, the invisible hand at her mother’s throat on Mustafar, the mountain of corpses Anakin has left in his wake. She doubts. 

“Hey,” Ahsoka says, pulling back just enough to look Leia in the eye. She clucks her tongue and wipes at Leia’s cheeks, wipes away salt water, tears that Leia hadn’t even known she’d shed. “I’ll make you a promise, Leia Naberrie: I will come back to you. You will see me again.”

“I’ll hold you to that,” Leia warns, even as she doubts again. Luke had promised never to be sundered from her. Her mothers had promised to keep them all together. She would not be surprised if this third promise breaks, too. 

Ahsoka kisses her brow. “Let’s go,” she says. “It’s time for you to leave.”

Leia stumbles away from the dejarik table and its bench, and she’s crying again, more terribly than she’d wept before the Duinuogwuin, nearly as terribly as she’d wept when Luke was taken from her. She had not shed a tear when leaving her mothers, she had not cried for Jyn, but, stars, she cries now, no matter how fiercely she scrubs at her cheeks, no matter how hard she tries to even her hiccuping breath. 

“Socks,” she chokes out, and Ahsoka’s hand tightens around her own. 

“You’ve been so strong, Leia,” Ahsoka says softly as she guides Leia down the gangplank and into the clearing. “You can be strong still.”

 _I can’t_ , Leia wants to say, or _I’m not strong, not at all,_ and the dragon’s voice whispers _you are not alone_ but how awfully alone she feels, knowing that she’s leaving Ahsoka or that Ahsoka is leaving her. 

It’s impossible, that she could go on without Socks. It’s so necessary. She can’t do it. She must. 

Barriss, Han, and Chewbacca are waiting in the clearing for them, Han himself a little damp around the eyes as he looks long and hard at the _Falcon._ Chewbacca, never the most stoic among them, lows quietly. Only Barriss is composed, and only by comparison. Her hand trembles ever so slightly when she lifts it to adjust her veil. 

But Ahsoka smiles warmly at them all in the pre-dawn light. She hugs Chewie, clasps hands with Han. She takes Barriss in her arms and kisses her deeply; Leia, embarrassed and curious, lets her embarrassment get the better of her and turns away. 

“I love you,” Ahsoka says, quiet and intent.

“I love you,” Barriss whispers back.

Leia dares glance back. Ahsoka is smiling, but Barriss’ eyes glisten with tears. 

Ahsoka steps out from Barriss’ arms and smiles at them all. “I’ll catch up with you,” she says, a promise. “We’ll see each other again.”

Han sighs. “Take care of the _Falcon,_ Ahsoka.” Pitching his voice louder, he calls up into the ship, “And that goes double for you, Artoo!”

Artoo wheels to the top of the gangplank with a shriek of indignation, but calms at Han’s grin. 

Leia takes a deep breath. She can do this. Even if every part of her screams in protest, she can do this. “Goodbye, Artoo,” she calls. And, quieter, willing her voice not to break: “Goodbye, Socks.”

“It’s only temporary,” Ahsoka says reassuringly. “We’ll meet again, Leia.”

Leia swallows, dry, and nods. It’s all she can do.

“Off we go, then,” Barriss says with a steady voice. She holds out her hand. “Come, Leia.”

Feeling as though her every limb were made of stone, Leia takes Barriss’ hand, and follows her into the forest.

She looks back, once, unable to stop herself; sees Artoo, trundling down the ramp to bump up against Ahsoka, who is standing there, watching them go, some unreadable expression on her face. She looks so small, standing there with only Artoo for company, that Leia can’t bear it; so she looks forward, and wipes her cheeks again with the hand that Barriss is not holding. 

Thape looms before them, all grey-green forests and golden plains and swathes of silvery desert. It’s one of the smaller planets Luke has seen; certainly, in comparison to Bespin, it’s tiny. But it’s foreboding all the same, in a way that feels deeply incongruous with its size and appearance. 

Luke glances at his father surreptitiously. If Anakin feels that strange foreboding, his face betrays none of it. But Hondo is whispering uneasily to Ventress in the hall just outside the cockpit, and Ventress herself is even more austere than she usually is, still and grim-faced in the hall’s shadows.

Anakin says, “The tracking beacon is still active.”

“That’s good, right?” Luke asks. “That means we can find them.”

Anakin is quiet for a moment, thinking. “It means that either they didn’t discover the tracker, or they’re setting a trap.”

Luke’s heart thuds loudly in his chest. He doesn’t know which one to wish for. 

Anakin grins at him. “Time to spring the trap, Luke.”

It occurs to him, for the first time, that Anakin might actually be insane. He glances back at Ventress, but she’s still grim and stoic, abandoning Hondo to his anxieties and sliding into one of the passenger’s seats in the cockpit. She raises her brows at him when she catches Luke looking helplessly at her, but says nothing. 

He swallows. “Time to spring the trap,” he echoes weakly, and Anakin’s grin broadens, and the ship begins its descent.

INTERLUDE: AHSOKA

Ahsoka watches them go, Artoo quiet at her side. Barriss and Leia, Han and Chewbacca, all vanish into the trees. Her heart goes with them. She feels emptier, not lighter, without it.

After a long silence, disrupted only by the susurrus of wind through leaves, Artoo whistles, low and plaintive. She touches the crest of his dome with the tips of her fingers. “I know.”

He whistles again, sharp, acerbic, making all too clear what he thinks of her plan, as he had when she’d first come up with it, told him before all others. In the Clone Wars, Artoo was as reckless as the rest of them, high on borrowed time and more near-misses than they could count. But it’s been almost fourteen years since the Clone Wars ended, and he’s been Luke and Leia’s guardian all that time. Once, Artoo would’ve gone with her without complaint. Now, he stands still at her side, awaiting whatever comes next. But he does complain. 

Ahsoka bears it like she bears everything else: with patience, with calm, hard-earned and dearly learned over the years since she first met Anakin Skywalker. She says nothing. Whatever she feels—the emptiness, the consternation, the doubt that this is the best thing she can do—she releases into the Force. 

Artoo shuffles discontentedly on his arms, whirring a grumble in her direction, and then reverses, making for the higher ground of the Falcon’s gangplank. There he stands like a sentry, a guard. 

“I don’t know what I’ll do when I see him again,” Ahsoka says aloud. It’s no less true for the number of times she’s said or thought it, for the length of time she’s had to think about it. Fourteen years she’s been waiting for this moment, and still, she’s at a loss. 

Artoo is quiet for a long moment, and then she hears him in motion behind her, wheeling down the gangplank and slotting next to her over the tamped-down grasses. His closest arm brushes her thigh. The contact grounds, soothes.

Artoo says, _I don’t know, either._

Ahsoka meditates.

Artoo is keeping watch, perched on the _Falcon_ ’s boarding ramp, one of his photoreceptors extended upward like a periscope. Every so often, he warbles quietly to himself, but Ahsoka barely registers the sound: she is in the inky galactic black of the Force, struck through with stars. Her attention is on something else entirely. 

Anakin is coming, and Luke is with him. And so is Asajj, and so, presumably, is Hondo Ohnaka. They’d left Naboo with him, in his ship. Unless they’ve changed ships, or Anakin’s killed him, Hondo will be there, still. 

They’d made such good time to Bespin. They wouldn’t have had time to change ships. 

She can’t with any certainty say whether or not Anakin will have killed Hondo. She hopes not, for Hondo’s sake and for Anakin’s. For Luke’s, most of all. The thought of him trapped all these years, a prisoner to his father’s hatred— 

Ahsoka exhales, and releases the thought into the Force. It will do her no good to hold onto those feelings of anger and despair. Even hope is dangerous to her now. She cannot afford to be blind to Anakin’s failings and cruelties. She must protect Leia. She must buy them as much time as she can. 

Her lightsabers, with their white-bright crystals, are hooked onto her hips. She doesn’t want to have to use them. She wants, impossibly, for there to be a way forward here that does not involve violence. She’s seen enough holos of Vader’s battle prowess to know that the longer a fight drags on, the less likely she is to win it. And she has promises to keep. 

The stars darken, like some great shadow moves over them. Ahsoka opens her eyes. They’re here. 

She stays sitting, her breath slow and even, as she watches their ship enter atmosphere; as it disappears into the forest to the east. She stays sitting, and waits for them to come to her. 

It takes them merely a half-hour. As they draw closer, she climbs to her feet, and nods for Artoo to retreat into the _Falcon_ ’s cockpit. She breathes deep, and releases her anxiety, her fear, her anger into the Force. 

Luke skids into the clearing around the _Falcon_ first, but it’s Anakin, right behind him, who draws her attention. Asajj and Hondo she notices just enough to register their presence, to mentally calculate the odds of their being allies or adversaries should this encounter turn violent; but her entirety is focused on the man who had been her master.

He looks so much the same: that same gold-brown shoulder-length hair, those same blue eyes, that same scar across his brow. The confidence in his gait; how he slows when he sees her, though he must have known she’d be here. The way his arms swing slightly at his side, only one hand gloved to protect the circuitry of his prosthetic. That familiar blue lightsaber hanging at his hip. 

With effort, Ahsoka wrenches her gaze away from Anakin. She looks at Luke, and forces herself to smile. “Hi, Luke,” she says quietly.

Luke stands frozen at the edge of the clearing, leaves of grass reaching nearly to his knees. His eyes dart to the _Falcon_ and back to her. “Socks,” he says slowly, and her heart breaks at the nickname so earnestly said, “where’s Leia?”

“She’s safe. She misses you, but she’s safe.”

Tears gather in Luke’s eyes, but do not fall. His shoulders sag. Asajj, of all beings, lays a hand comfortingly on his shoulder. And then Anakin steps forward.

“Ahsoka,” he says, voice low.

She takes a deep breath and releases it. “Anakin.”

He takes a step forward; she stands her ground, but her hands go to her sabers. He stops.

“It’s good to see you,” he says cautiously.

Answers clamor at the tip of her tongue: anger, recrimination, bitterness. She swallows each one down. He takes another step forward.

“I don’t know how I feel about seeing you,” Ahsoka says honestly.

Anger flares in his eyes and dies there just as quickly. He does not move. He says, “That’s okay.”

Luke and Asajj turn as one and stare at him. Ahsoka can’t help herself. She stares, too. 

“Is it,” she says. “Why is it okay, Anakin?”

Anakin swallows. He says nothing. The Temple massacre looms between them, a host of revenants blurred lightsaber-blue in the corners of her eyes. The Purges, too. The Inquisitors she’s had to escape or defeat over the years. The friends she’s lost, murdered by him or by his orders.

She says, quietly, “Do you have any idea what you’ve done to me?”

A muscle tics in his jaw. “We need not be adversaries.”

“No one said anything about being adversaries,” Luke objects sharply.

Ahsoka shifts her weight. “We are adversaries,” she says, a little apologetic. “We are opposed. There must be an accounting—a reckoning, if we are to be resolved.”

Anakin is silent, jaw set. His hand twitches toward his lightsaber, but does not release or ignite it. 

She looks to Luke. He’s too pale, like Leia’s pale, all these years in space with only solar lamps and vitamins to replace the radiation of a yellow star. His hair is dark blond and long, braided down his back. He’s so thin. 

Gently, she says, “Why did you bring him here, Luke?”

A tear tracks down his cheek. “I wanted to see my sister.”

“I swore,” says Ahsoka, “to your mothers, that I would protect her from him. I will not fail in that duty, Luke.”

Luke looks at her, searching. “Do you think she needs protection from him?”

Ahsoka glances at Anakin, still motionless and watchful. “I think,” she says, “that he’s the second most dangerous being in the Galaxy, and I think that the time has come for him to speak for himself.”

Luke flinches.

All attention swings back to Anakin. He clears his throat. “My daughter has nothing to fear from me.”

Ahsoka glances back at Luke. “The way your son has nothing to fear from you?”

It’s Anakin’s turn to flinch. He can’t hold her gaze. 

“Ahsoka,” Luke whispers. It takes him two tries to get the words out. “He never hurt me.”

She looks at him, poor small boy with a galaxy on his thin shoulders. “Forgive me,” she says softly, “but I don’t entirely believe that, Luke.”

“He’s my _son_ ,” Anakin snarls. 

“And Padmé was your wife, when you raised the Force against her on Mustafar,” Ahsoka retorts. “And Obi-Wan was your best friend, when you razed the Temple. And I—” Her voice breaks. “I was your Padawan, and you sent Inquisitors after everyone just like me across the stars. I was your Padawan, and I lived in the aftermath of your massacre for a week. _I was your Padawan_ , and you betrayed everything I knew to be true and right and good. Everything _you taught me_.” 

Anakin bows his head. “What do you want me to say, Ahsoka?”

She looks at him curiously, dispassionately. “Did you ask forgiveness from Padmé and Obi-Wan?”

He says nothing. It’s all the answer she needs.

“I want,” she says, “for you to be someone I recognize. I want for you to have never done all the terrible things you’ve done since the Republic fell. I want you to want to be forgiven, to want to earn forgiveness, even if you never do. And I want you to give me one good reason I should let you leave this place alive.”

Luke is suddenly between them. “I won’t let you kill him,” he says flatly. “And I won’t let him kill you. No one is dying here today.”

“Oh, Luke,” she says. She can’t think of anything else to say. Much as she is ruinously relieved to have had the possibility of mortal combat forestalled, she doesn’t really know what else to do, with Anakin, with her promise to Padmé and Sabé, her promise to Leia, her promise to Han, her promise to Barriss. With her promise to herself, all those years ago, that Anakin was alive, and if he were alive, he could be saved. 

Ahsoka relaxes her hands at her sides, sees Anakin and Asajj do the same. She says, “I’d like to talk to Luke. Alone.”

Anakin takes a half-step forward before he remembers the uncomfortable stalemate into which they’d fallen. “Like hells,” he snaps. “You’ll take him.”

“I won’t,” Ahsoka says. She glances over her shoulder. “We can stand on the other side of the clearing. You can see us, but we can speak privately.”

He hesitates.

“I wouldn’t leave without Asajj and Hondo, anyway,” Ahsoka adds. Asajj’s eyes glitter like gemstones. She forces her gaze back to Anakin.

“I’ll talk to you,” Luke says suddenly. He looks at Anakin. “This is my choice,” he says, soft enough that it was probably not meant for anyone else’s hearing, but she picks it up easily, Togrutan hearing always an advantage.

And Anakin relents. He steps back, and Luke advances, until he’s abreast with Ahsoka, and past her. She follows him to the far side of the clearing. 

“Socks,” he starts, and stops. He shakes his head.

Her heart breaks for him. So quiet, and while he’d never been precisely gregarious with anyone but Leia, he’d been lively, as a child. That liveliness is gone now. 

“Luke,” she says. “It’s so good to see you.”

A shadow of a smile flies across his face at that, something so tremulous it’s like he can barely stand to hold it in place. “It’s good to see you, too, Socks.”

“Luke—why are you here? And why did you bring him?”

He shivers, though it isn’t cold. His eyes dart toward Anakin and back to her. He says, “I went to Naboo and she wasn’t there.”

Ahsoka waits. 

“She wasn’t there, and—and the only thing they could think to do with him was imprison him,” Luke says, his voice growing stronger. “When he’d helped me escape from the Empire. When his bringing me home was _proof_ that he could, could choose better. When I’d seen his capacity for good time after time—and all they could do was stick him in a cell and leave him there to rot.” He looks up at her, imploring. “How is he supposed to do better in a cell? That’s not justice.”

“So you freed him,” Ahsoka says. She knows the how, the sequence of events that led from Luke’s bedroom to Hondo’s ship. Quietly, she says, “Freeing him isn’t justice, either, Luke.”

Luke looks away, toward Anakin again. “I didn’t know what else to do,” he says, just as quiet. “I couldn’t leave him. You don’t know what it was like, all those years with him. He was trapped as much as I was.”

“Luke,” she whispers, stricken. “Luke, he was the adult, he was the second most powerful man in the galaxy! If he had wanted you returned to your mothers, he could have made it happen. If all it took for him to leave _was to leave_ , why didn’t he do so all those years ago?”

Luke is silent for a long moment. “Because he refused to see that he was trapped, even as he built the bars of his own cage.”

That arrests her. At length, she says, “Do you think he could be a danger to Leia?”

“I’d die before I let him hurt her,” Luke says fiercely.

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Ahsoka says, “it coming to that. I don’t want anyone to die, Luke. Least of all you.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Luke says, and he suddenly looks far older than almost fourteen. He smiles, tiny and still tremulous. “I’ve survived him, I’ve survived the Death Star, I’ve survived the Emperor. I can keep surviving, to keep her safe.”

“Luke,” she whispers. “Are you alright?”

He shrugs. That one gesture is awful in its simplicity, in its disregard. “As much as I can be.”

That’s not an answer. She opens her mouth to press him, but he says, “You should talk to him. To Anakin.”

“I was going to,” Ahsoka says slowly. “But, Luke—I meant it, when I told you that you and your sister come first. Before him. I mean it still.”

“You don’t,” he says, shrugging again, not meeting her eyes. “You put Leia first. You don’t know if you can trust me. Not with him along. I don’t blame you, Socks. I’m glad she has you looking out for her. But don’t lie to me, or to yourself, about it.”

It’s as effective a blow as she’s ever been dealt. She stumbles under the force of it. “Luke,” she tries, but he cuts her off.

“I don’t blame you, Ahsoka,” Luke says again. He stares off into the distance. She can read nothing in his face except exhaustion. “We’re all doing what we have to do.”

“Luke.” She waits until he looks at her, and then only fleetingly. “Say the word, and I’ll get you out of here. You’re not responsible for him. You’re not— _bound_ to him. You can leave Anakin Skywalker behind, and I can help you do it. I _will_ help you do it. If you ask me.”

His gaze fixes on a point over her shoulder. “But I am bound to him,” Luke says softly. “I’m sorry. I can’t ask you. I won’t.”

Ahsoka takes a deep breath, releases it slowly. “Then it’s time I talk to Anakin.”

Luke nods, and starts back toward the others. 

“Luke,” she says. He glances toward her over his shoulder. “This isn’t a one-time offer. You can ask me at any point. Do you understand?”

But he only smiles, faint and thin as the edge of a knife, and continues onward.

Anakin meets her halfway across the clearing. Luke pauses to exchange some words with him—Ahsoka can’t quite make them out—but Anakin claps him on the shoulder and continues to meet her. He moves with purpose, like he did when she last knew him. She wonders if this is what the Temple younglings saw, before they died: Anakin Skywalker, the Hero With No Fear, striding toward them, purpose written in every step. 

He slows as he approaches, and she wonders, too, if he can see the thought written on her face. 

“Ahsoka,” he says, low.

She takes another deep breath. “Hello, Anakin.”

He flinches at the name, as though still unused to it. She supposes he must be unused to it, after so long as Darth Vader. 

The silence stretches for long minutes. He waits. She waits, too. 

Finally, she says, “Why are you here, Anakin?”

He stands a little straighter. “Luke brought me.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I don’t know what answer you want,” he snaps.

“The truth,” she snaps back. And quieter: “I want the truth.”

Anakin looks anywhere but at her. “Luke said you hoped for me.”

“I did,” Ahsoka says. “I hoped until I no longer had that luxury.” She doesn’t want to ask; she has to know. “Did you never think of me?”

A wry, bitter thing twists his lips. “Only when I had the luxury.” A pause. She opens her mouth; he beats her to it. “Luke says Barriss is with you.”

“She is my partner,” Ahsoka says evenly. 

“You forgave her so well that you love her,” Anakin says. He finally meets her eyes. “Is it so impossible you could forgive me?”

She can’t hold his gaze. “I don’t know. Barriss…has made restitution. Barriss accepts that she was wrong. Barriss works every day to leave the Galaxy better than it was before. What have you done, Anakin?”

He says nothing. What can he say? His silence is its own answer. 

Ahsoka says, “Leia has said that you are coming to teach her.” His eyes snap to hers at this. She holds his gaze. “What would you teach her, Anakin?”

“What I’ve taught Luke,” he says, and, more quietly: “I could complete her training.”

The way he had never completed her own. She swallows, and releases her anger, her bitterness, into the Force. His eyes slip from her own, as though he can sense everything she’s feeling, as though he can track it up into Thape’s atmosphere and into the Living Force. It’s uncomfortable, being the subject of that much scrutiny. She thinks of the nearly fourteen years he’s been on the other side of things, and thinks: _the discomfort is the point._

Anakin says, “I could complete your training, too. If you wanted.”

“Once, I wanted that,” Ahsoka says. “But that was a long time ago.”

“What is it you want from me, then?”

“I think,” she says, “the better question is: what do you want, Anakin?”

He’s silent for a moment. “I want my family back.”

That’s hardly an option. She waits.

He looks at her, eyes narrowed and calculating. “I want to meet my daughter. And she wants to meet me.”

Ahsoka almost laughs. “No. She doesn’t.”

“Maybe not,” he concedes, “but she has foreseen it. It is inevitable.”

“Nothing is inevitable.”

“You forget your training, Ahsoka,” Anakin says, and sounds suddenly tired. “The Force is inevitable. It always is.”

She recalls that luminous Force-instinct that had guided her in the aftermath of the Republic’s fall, to entrapping Asajj on Wobani, that has led her here, to this moment. She says nothing. 

“It is inevitable,” Anakin says again. “It has been foretold. There is nothing you could do to stop it from happening.”

 _I could kill you,_ she thinks suddenly. How much grief would that cause or stay? 

“You could try,” Anakin says, and his eyes glint strangely in the sunlight. “You would fail. Don’t try, Ahsoka.”

“‘We need not be adversaries,’” she quotes back at him. “What would you have us be instead?”

“Is it too much to hope for that we might be friends again?”

The _yes_ that clamors behind her teeth tastes false. “I think so,” she says slowly. That tastes truer. 

“Then,” he says, “let us be allies, at least. You want to protect my daughter. I want both of my children safe. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Ahsoka.”

 _Liar_ , she thinks. “What did you do to him? To Luke?”

A muscle jumps in his jaw. “I kept him safe.”

“He’s so different,” Ahsoka murmurs. “Being with you has changed him.”

“People don’t change,” Anakin says, something hollow and cynical in his voice. “Not really. Not at their core.”

“Is that meant to reassure me? If it is, it isn’t working.”

He shrugs. “It’s not meant to do anything. It’s the truth.”

“It’s _your_ truth,” she corrects, out of habit, but she doubts even as she says it. He sees her doubt. His mouth ticks up at one corner in a familiar crooked smile. 

“Let us be allies, Ahsoka,” he says again. “Let me meet my daughter. Let me teach her.”

She pinches the bridge of her nose. “This is,” she says, “the worst idea you’ve ever had.”

His smile broadens. “Now that’s saying something.”

“I want to talk to Asajj,” Ahsoka announces. She makes for the others, but Anakin catches her upper arm. She yanks free of him and has her sabers drawn, if not ignited, in the next second.

He spreads his hands, as if to say _no harm_ , as if to say _all innocence._ She does not believe him for a second. 

“It’s unnecessary,” he says. “That’s all.”

She points one unlit saber at him before hooking them both back over her hips. “I’ll decide what is and isn’t necessary for Leia’s safety,” Ahsoka says, “and you will abide by my decisions if there is to be the slightest hope of this working. I decide that it is necessary to talk to Asajj. You will stay out of it. And don’t ever touch me again.”

“Ahsoka,” he says, and nothing else. Or at least, she doesn’t wait to hear if he has anything else to say, and after a moment, he follows her back to the others. 

Asajj approaches her, meets her halfway as Anakin had, but steers well clear of him. 

“What do you make of this?” Ahsoka says as soon as they’re out of Anakin’s earshot. 

Asajj rolls her eyes. “‘It’s so wonderful to see you, Asajj, I’m so glad you survived Mandalore, Asajj. Thank you for looking after the boy, Asajj.’”

“Of course I’m glad to see you,” Ahsoka says, “of course I’m glad you survived Mandalore and won so many battles there, of course I’m grateful that you looked after Luke. Does that need to be said?”

 _“Yes,”_ Asajj says, “considering the number of times I nearly died, yes, it needs to be said.”

Ahsoka touches her gently on the shoulder. “I’m glad you’re alive, and here, and well, Asajj. Thank you for looking after Luke.”

Asajj’s expression turns charmed, almost, before she schools it back into nonchalance. “How’s Jyn? How’s the girl?”

“Leia’s safe,” Ahsoka says, “she’s with Barriss.” Asajj’s face twists in displeasure. “Jyn was recalled by Alliance Intelligence. She’s on a mission with them now.”

Asajj’s expression freezes. “I put her into your care,” she says slowly, voice rising on every syllable, “and you _handed her over to Intelligence?!”_

“She chose to go,” Ahsoka says firmly. “The mission has something to do with her father. She chose to go.”

“You should have forbidden it,” Asajj snarls.

“The orders came directly from Wellspring. I couldn’t countermand them if I wanted to. And Jyn wanted to go, and she’s with Draven’s best agent, and she’s capable, Asajj. You taught her well. She’ll be fine.”

“If anything happens to her,” Asajj says lowly, and stops.

“Nothing will happen to her,” Ahsoka says. “Our energies are better spent worrying for those she’ll happen to. She’ll be fine.”

Asajj bares her teeth, but says nothing else.

“Now,” Ahsoka says, “what do you make of our current situation?”

“You cannot tell me you are actually considering taking him to the girl.”

“Is it worth considering?”

“Skywalker attacked me,” Asajj says with cold anger, “when I dared suggest he should not approach his daughter as an enemy. He apologized for it later, at the boy’s behest, but he has as little control over his temper as he’s ever had. He reacts first, then apologizes, perhaps, if the boy is watching, but he does not think things through. He reacts, and he reacts with violence. I would not have allowed him within so much as the same system as the girl. I still do not understand why you did.”

“I wanted to put a stop to it,” Ahsoka murmurs. “I didn’t want to forever be on the run.”

Asajj leans forward. “We can put a stop to it,” she says urgently. “Say the word: he cannot forever guard against us both, let alone us and Offee. We can free the children. We can end this.”

But Ahsoka looks past Asajj’s shoulder, across the clearing to where Luke is watching her, something distant and knowing in his eyes. It would break him, she thinks, more than he’s been broken already, to have them kill Anakin in front of him.

“What about Luke?” she asks.

“What about him?”

“Can he be trusted?”

Asajj is silent for a moment, watching Ahsoka through slitted eyes. “All he wants is his sister safe, even from his father,” she says at last. “Or so he says. But he also wants his father safe, even from his sister. Perhaps even he does not know which of the two is more important to him. He has spent so long just trying to survive.”

Ahsoka takes a deep breath, and releases her misgivings into the Force. 

“I want to reunite Luke and Leia,” she says. “I want the luxury of hoping for Anakin again. I don’t want anyone to die.”

“We don’t always get what we want,” Asajj says bitterly. Ahsoka looks at her: her dark mouth, her glittering eyes, the way the skin gleams, hairless, over her skull. Her heart aches.

“I wish I knew how to release you from this bond to me,” she says quietly. “But until then—will you help me?”

“I’m yours,” Asajj says, like she had those years ago, in the hangar on Horizon Base. “Say the word, and it’s done.”

“Then we’ll go to Leia and the others,” Ahsoka decides. “And if Anakin so much as raises his voice to her—to either of them—we kill him.”

Asajj sketches a half-bow. “With pleasure,” she says, mean and intent, and it’s all Ahsoka can do not to shiver. Together, they walk back to the others. 

Hondo perks up immediately upon their return. “Is it my turn, then?”

“No,” Asajj says, folding her arms.

Hondo scowls. “I’ve never felt so undervalued in my life,” he complains.

Ahsoka smiles, can’t help it, doesn’t want to try. “It’s good to see you, too, Hondo.”

Appeased, Hondo slouches back against a tree. Ahsoka looks at the rest of them. 

“I’ll take you to Leia,” she says. From the corner of her eye, she sees Luke sag, as though impossibly relieved, as though without any hope. And to Anakin: “But if you endanger her at all, in the slightest way—”

“I won’t,” he says quickly. 

She swallows the threat down. “See to it that you don’t,” she says, and makes for the _Falcon_. “We’ll camp here tonight, and catch up with them tomorrow. They won’t have gotten too far.”

Leia’s feet are killing her.

She’s not used to this pace, to the uneven texture of a forest floor, to the weight of her rucksack on her shoulders. But hells if she’ll complain. She bites the inside of her cheek to distract from the soreness of her feet. 

They’ve been walking for hours. Barriss presses determinedly ahead, setting their pace; Chewbacca, at the rear, holds them to it. Leia and Han, in the middle, do their best to keep up. It’s hard on both of them, but she thinks it’s harder on Han. If it is, though, she has no way of knowing: his mouth is pressed firmly shut for once.

They walk in silence through the rise of Thape’s sun and its apex in the sky. It’s only when sweat drips down her back that Leia notices that they’ve been walking on an incline for some time. This gives her hope: perhaps the Naboo, and their mountain fortress, aren’t so far off as all that. But Barriss never slows, allows them only brief rests every hour, a longer break at midday to eat something. 

It’s only when Barriss stops unexpectedly that Leia suspects something might be wrong. She extends herself in the Force, seeking Ahsoka’s star-bright signature, and finds herself suddenly blinded by light: a pulse of violet, an eclipsed sun, a man on fire. 

“They’ve found her,” she gasps, and stumbles forward to Barriss, searching out her hand with blurred eyes. “Ventress—and Luke, and _him_ —”

“I know,” Barriss says. “I feel it, too.” 

“They won’t hurt her,” Leia says; begs, really. 

But Barriss’ face is shadowed. “I don’t think anyone knows what Vader or Ventress would do.”

“What’s going on?” Han demands, catching up to them.

“Ahsoka has company,” Barriss says curtly. She stares back through the trees the way they’d come, and the longing on her face is plain for them all to read, so much so that Leia almost feels embarrassed, or would if she were not so full with longing herself. 

Chewie howls softly, and Barriss’ eyes snap to him, then to Leia. “You’re right,” she says, almost to herself. “We must press on. It’s what Ahsoka would have us do.”

They keep walking. There’s new urgency in Barriss’ stride, now. She does not allow them so many reprieves, and no one asks for one, either. Fear fuels them: fear, and a desperate desire to not let Ahsoka’s sacrifice be wasted. Leia can read the emotional state of each of them as though the emotions themselves were writ large in the very air around them. At least she’s not alone, in feeling as she does. And the dragon says to her: _you are never alone._

She shivers, and keeps going. 

They camp that night under the boughs of a great leafy tree, no fire to warm them against the cool night air. Han drops off quickest, snoring practically before he’s finished his ration pack, and Chewbacca sorts out the watch schedule with Barriss after rescuing Han’s shirt from what remains of the rations in his hand. 

Barriss takes the first watch, and she waits until Chewie’s fallen asleep before touching Leia’s shoulder, summoning her to another tree a little ways from Han and Chewie’s sleeping forms. 

Leia waits, the stillness of the night air too delicate to fracture with speech, Barriss’ conviction more delicate still. And eventually, Barriss speaks. 

“You wished to learn,” she says, voice pitched low so as not to wake the others, “of the Dark Side.”

Leia nods, her heart in her throat. 

“I am a poor teacher for you,” Barriss says. “My experience with it is so limited.”

“But you came back,” Leia says. 

“Not all of me,” Barriss says again. “Are you sure you wish to learn?”

“I don’t want to,” Leia says, with more bravery than she feels, “but I think I must.”

“Then this is the first lesson,” Barriss says. “You know it already. Fear leads to anger, anger leads to hate, and hate leads to suffering. This is the path of the Dark Side.”

Leia swallows the retort that wants out. “I know that.”

“The Jedi teach passivity to access the Force. All is as the Force wills it. The Sith teach the opposite: your fear and anger and hate are the means through which the Force may be accessed and harnessed to your own ambitions. Still others—the Dathomiri witches, for one—do not distinguish between Light and Dark, and instead seek to shape their world in accordance with the Living Force.”

 _Balance,_ the Father had said. The Son: _Power._ The Daughter: _Hope._

Leia says cautiously, “I think I need to learn balance. A third way. But I think I have to understand the Dark Side before I can do that.”

“That sets my mind at ease,” Barriss says, quiet. “At least a little. To know your objective. But I do not envy you your task. Even the Jedi deal in absolutes. To try to strike a balance between the two...” She shakes her head. “It’s an impossible task, Leia.”

 _We are impossible things_ , the dragon whispers. _It is up to us to accomplish the impossible._

“And the last time someone made the attempt to balance the Force—” Barriss stops abruptly. 

Leia waits a moment. “What?”

Barriss looks at her oddly. “Nothing,” she murmurs. “It’s nothing. You should get some rest, Leia. It’s been a long day. Tomorrow will be one, too.”

They wake early, eat quickly, and are walking before the sun’s fully risen. Leia can’t get last night’s lesson with Barriss from her head. It was nothing new, except that bit about someone trying previously to balance the Force, but it’s not like she had expected Barriss to open with the great secrets of the Dark. She dwells, instead, on failure, and what it might mean to fail again. The Duinuogwuin might have extraordinary confidence in her, but right now Leia doubts herself.

By midday, the landscape dips and rolls around them, the trees grown great and tall. They climb hills and descend them, but Barriss says they’ve not yet reached the foothills of the mountains to which they’re marching; there will be another stretch of plateaued forest after these hills and valleys. 

But before they even can sight the plateau, Leia hears the song. 

It slams into her with such force that she stumbles and falls with a cry, her bones reverberating with a deep bass thrum, her ears ringing with a soprano melody so beautiful she wants to weep, so beautiful she is weeping, just from the sound of it. Hands help her up, pat down her arms and ankles for injury, but she is insensible to them, lost to the song. 

Be slow, the cave had told her. You cannot be still. Be slow instead. 

And: You must sacrifice, the cave had told her. You must be alone. 

The Force is the oldest of the gods, it had said. And the dragon had said, insistent: _you are never alone._

Barriss is saying something, but Leia cannot hear her; it is all she can do to focus on her face, those cobalt eyes. The song rises around her, in her, directing her like a string does a puppet. She points.

“We need to go there,” she says, gasps, tears pouring thick down her cheeks. 

She sees—she doesn’t, but she _sees_ —a great antlered beast with silver eyes like moonlight, turning to face her. She blinks, and he’s gone. 

“—the _hell_ is happening?” Han is shouting, and Barriss snaps at him to mind their surroundings and keep quiet, her hands so gentle on Leia’s shoulders.

Leia heaves herself to her feet. The song thrums through her like something awful, divine, alien. _I am not alone,_ she thinks fiercely at it: _I am not alone, and the dragon has no master._

 _You must learn how to kill the master,_ the dragon whispers. She whirls around in search of it, and sees only trees shot through with sunlight, the forest floor thick with leaf rot and undergrowth. She turns again, and sees Barriss, wide-eyed and worried, Han alarmed, Chewie clutching his crossbow like a comfort. She’s panting, she realizes, and sweat drips down from her hair, down her back. She can’t stop shaking. Her right hand, flame-white, burns anew; she seizes it with a shriek, and falls to her knees, all while the song sings wrathful around her. 

“Leia!” Barriss is at her side instantaneously, holding her steady. But Leia can’t keep still, can’t rest, cannot be soothed; she lurches to her feet and stumbles forward, past Han and Chewbacca, her hand burning without flame, as the song sings dark around her, pulling her inexorably forward. 

She’s dimly aware of Barriss, Han, and Chewbacca following her, vaguely cognizant of the argument erupting in her wake as she follows the burning pain of her arm through the trees, off the path Barriss had laid out for them, and down, and down, and down, through the thinning undergrowth and sun-dappled leaf rot on the forest floor. Until, at last, the song comes to a concussive crescendo, and she can barely see from the pain of her arm, but she sees him: massive, antlered, bearded, with eyes full of moonlight, turning to see her.

“Hello, little dragon,” rumbles the beast, and Leia falls again, into oblivion. 

She wakes to an absence of pain in her arm, and Han’s jacket draped over her, Han himself perched on his heels by her side. Barriss is between her and the beast, her lightsaber unlit in her hand. Leia can’t see Chewie; she shoves herself upright, panicked, in search of him, but he’s just standing behind her, softly growling. 

The beast looks over Barriss’ head and says, “Good. You’re awake. Our time is short, little dragon, and there is much to learn.”

The song is an almost inaudible hum around her. She takes a deep, slow breath, and the song grows closer. “Why is our time short?”

“What does that matter? It simply is.”

Leia says, “Who are you?”

“I am the Bendu,” says the Bendu. 

Barriss inhales sharply, and backs up to stand by Leia and Han. “What do you want?” she asks, and her voice shakes. Her lightsaber, still unlit, is still in her hand. 

“To teach the dragon,” the Bendu says, and Leia steps forth bravely. 

“Teach me, then,” she says, though Barriss has gone frozen beside her and Han has lurched to his feet, worry plain on his face, and Chewbacca’s growls have grown several decibels. 

The Bendu looks at them, and settles onto his haunches, his knuckles ground down into the earth, his arms like the trunks of trees. 

“You seek balance,” he says.

(Behind her, she hears Han whisper, “What is he talking about?” But Barriss hisses at him to be quiet.)

“I have been told,” Leia says carefully, “that it is the third path before me.”

“It is the only path forward,” says the Bendu. “Balance between the Light and the Dark. It is the only possible future.”

“Teach me, then,” Leia says. “Teach me how to bring balance to the Force.”

“That is something you must discover for yourself,” the Bendu says sternly, which sounds too evasive for Leia to have much patience with it. “What I must teach you is the nature of balance. _I_ am a creature of balance. And to be such is to take no part, to take no side, to favor nothing and no one. The nature of balance is neutrality, little dragon. And there is too much of the walkers of the sky in you to achieve it.”

“Why bother teaching her at all, then?” Han objects, puffing up behind her like some kind of defensive wildlife.

But Leia turns over the Bendu’s words in her mind, slowly, examining them from every angle she can think of. “Neutrality,” she says slowly. “What do you mean by that?”

“What I said,” the Bendu says. “It means taking no side, favoring no party. It means standing apart. It means being alone.”

“I am never alone,” Leia says fiercely. “And what do you do if you see something wrong being done? Just stand by and let it happen? Sounds an awful lot like privilege to me.”

“Balance is privileged,” the Bendu retorts. “And the Force is inexorable. All is as the Force wills it.”

“Someone should question that will,” Leia says mutinously. “To do nothing while a wrong is being committed is to aid injustice.”

“Balance is not the same as justice.”

“Isn’t it?”

“No,” says the Bendu, sounding ever so faintly exasperated. “It is not.”

“Then,” Leia says, “perhaps it is not worth striving for.”

The Bendu says, stern again, “It is the only thing worth striving for.”

“Why?” she demands. “Why is it so important, if it doesn’t do anything good?”

“Because good is not the end. It is a means.”

That arrests her. Leia says nothing, and watches the Bendu through slitted eyes. 

“The Force,” says the Bendu, gentler, “is shrouded in darkness. It must be balanced.”

“But not brought into the light,” Leia says slowly, and shakes her head. “I don’t know how to do that. I don’t understand why I should want to do that. If being in darkness is a bad thing, isn’t being in the light a good thing?”

“Good is not balance,” says the Bendu. “Balance is balance. It is neither good nor bad. It simply is.”

 _You must learn_ , whispers the dragon, _how to kill the master._

A thought looms on the horizon of her understanding, too terrible to contemplate. She recoils from it. It arrives anyway, inexorable.

She says quietly, “The Force is enslaved.”

All around her, the song rises in affirmation. 

“Who is it enslaved to?” she demands of the Bendu. “And how can I free it?”

But the Bendu says only, “Our time is come to a close, little dragon. I have taught you what you need.”

“Wait!” she cries. “I have more questions—you didn’t answer—” But even as she starts toward him, the Bendu begins to disappear, dissolving into air until all that is left is those moonlit eyes; and then they, too, are gone. 

That’s when the stormtroopers find them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is the last chapter I had pre-written, y'all. you might have to wait a while (like. July) for 8—I'm only 5k in to what should be another 10k chapter, and grad school is, as ever, eating me alive. my apologies for the cliffhanger. 'TWILL BE OKAY. 
> 
> as always: I am so sorry if I haven't gotten to your previous comments but know that I cherish each and every one, I read them over on bad days, they inspire me to keep writing, y'all make me feel like I've actually made something good for once. Thank you for that; I can't tell you how much it means to me.


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